At a late hour the same night, the students boarded their flight, scattered in their seating but for Mia and Aimee, sitting together with their heads laid against each other as they slept.

  Marisa sighed as she tapped the screen of the next seat's back. 'Ten dollars for a soda. Eighty dollar internet, seriously?' She felt that even having grown up in poverty, things were much cheaper when she was a child, the economy better. (That everyone's measurement of a good economy is frozen around the time they had no real financial obligations is, of course, almost too much of a truism to note.)

  The bathroom door opened behind her, and out shuffled a Chinese man with a cyst growing from his neck. He stopped near the front row, and as he turned his head back, a green mist rapidly erupted from his nostrils & eyes,

  coiling as it filled the fuselage and the passengers' nostrils, knocking them unconscious.

  The mist traveled the aisle beside Marisa, and Boudoir's fabric burst out from her face to form a gas mask. Green mist shimmered in the corridor, sparse enough that she still saw his silhouette ahead as groans filled the fuselage. Leaning her head back as if she were similarly affected, she angled her right glove down & forward and a set of bullets erupted out from them; the mist threw it back to her, but the projectiles softened as they hit her throat - she knew he was aware of her now.

  Boudoir's sword formed and her frills extended as she rushed up from her seat; she trudged into the mist and found more resistance than she had expected, green tendrils slashing at her and halting her advance; she hacked and smote as she could, but inch-by-inch, the pressure of their strikes forced her further back as mist continued to spew from him ahead.

  Around her she smelt an internal decay begin within the civilians and winced; she swept back from a vicious swipe of the mist, yet her back was to the bathroom door now; reaching her hands out, she slapped a layer of cushioned fabric on each side, then shot a Boudoir bullet into each that ricocheted with extreme force; they broke through the mist like a razor and left two gaping holes in her foe's silhouette ahead, yet still he moved, clutching the cyst at his neck once more.

  That was all she saw before she was forced back into the bathroom directly, and as the suffocating mist sought to crush her alive here, the next scene was instant. A Boudoir spike grew out from her head like the horn of a lesbian unicorn, and she slashed through the ceiling above until it was exposed to the outside air; the pressure differential pulled the mist within to the outside in an instant, clearing her space ahead as she began her forward rush, shooting the hole she had caused closed before shooting another open at her side.

  Again and again she dispersed the mists around, lightening her sight of her foe clutching the holes in his skull ahead; she was within a few seconds of him now, and he held his hand out as if to cry out before her strands gripped him by his body, held him aloft, then as a woman may rend a chicken, tore him apart in a blender of blood and gore.

  The mist dissipated as his corpse fell dead ahead, yet a final gasp of miasma burst out from his still-beating heart; some into the cockpit and the rest into the fuselage; and began corroding hundreds of holes clear through the plane's walls; Marisa shouted for Boudoir and shot every hole she saw closed, but behind her, the civilians & other students were awakening in a panic as the plane careened downward, emergency masks & hands flailing, and as Marisa felt the presence of another enemy host behind -

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  "- motherf- Boudoir!" she shouted; she shot a strand left and yanked herself clear out of the plane to the air outside, and another swing put her on top of the nose, shooting another twenty holes closed as she landed. Digging her rainbow boots deep, she shot a hundred strands around the plane's nose, grunting with exertion as she tried pulling it upright again.

  Then she remembered the laws of physics existed and that she could not lift herself.

  She sighed as a mask & goggles formed over her face in the heavy winds. She stepped once, then stomped down and the sponginess of her soles launched herself high up and above, her strands still attached to the nose as she pulled it high -

  - until the nose crumbled into pieces: she screamed in frustration as she suddenly fell & fell & fell, the entrails of what had been the second enemy host blasting her in the face as she fell past the de-nosed plane and shouted "WHAT THE FUCK!" at the students within and heard Aimee's: "-sorry- threw my knife-!"

  A nose of ice gave the plane its scent back, but Mia winced as they continued careening downward; she saw Marisa twirling wildly through the air below, an exaggerated sigh still curling her lips as she gave Aimee both middle fingers and disappeared within the clouds below. Marisa would be alright, of course; likely not even harmed; but perhaps even worse was that she had been inconvenienced.

  Mia felt sympathy for her, then remembered every bumpy Boudoir-ride back to Urasaria, then did not feel sympathy.

  The plane continued to fall; at her back, Mia heard Makoto shouting: "Symphony: Hymn- hey what the fuck, get your dirty butch hands off me-"

  " - I DON'T KNOW HOW YOU THINK AIRPLANES WORK AND I AM NOT FUCKING FINDING OUT WITH CIVILIANS ONBOARD!"

  A series of shockwaves erupted outside and set the plane level again; Mia did not know whose Revenant this was, but realized it when she felt Matoi's strict hand on her shoulder. Wedding's Shinto hood was summoned, as were its missile silos. "Mia and Samuel. Your Revenants can steer it. You'll need to lower in tandem. Samuel, you have Outcast's telekinesis. Mia, heat and cool the air to form the wind current it will ride."

  Mia was nervous. "I don't know if my wind is strong enough to-"

  "We aren't needing wind strong enough to kill. It's a passenger plane. You're a host. There's no civilian or invention of one superior to you. Focus."

  Mia fell under the whip of that voice quickly as Samuel came up beside.

  His Revenant Outcast was summoned over him. To those who did not know Samuel, it appeared a flexible suit of obsidian armor. But whenever he summoned it, there was a moment where he could feel his flesh slurry into summoned obsidian, a skin of obsidian that moved and twitched and bent as easily as flesh, animated by something other than blood but still granted nourishment in the cycles of systole and dystole.

  Ghastly blue hands swarmed over the plane's frozen nose, telekinetically pressing, slowly lowering the plane yet unable to prevent a full descent.

  Mia felt Rider's tendrils dip into her veins as she formed a weak wind current, one of no use for host-killing yet useful enough here, gradually alternating fire & ice scarabs outside to chill & heat the air necessary to set the plane steadily downward.

  They were a mile down when Mia saw another plane approaching her right; another plane that would have collided had a series of missiles not burst out from Matoi's heavily-armored Wedding and their shockwaves blasted the other plane up over them.

  "They'll feel a bit of turbulence." said Matoi plainly. "Continue."

  Eventually they landed the plane in one of the indistinguishable patches of farmland that typified the Midwest. They remained with the civilians until civilian emergency services arrived, and in typical student fashion, forgot that anyone may actually like to know why they had almost died, and so left in a rideshare before they were asked such questions directly.