Fair.

Doll could feel them, they were surrounding her, she could feel the patterns of their planned attacks almost instinctively now, her attunement to the Qi of others had developed substantially in the past year.

At this moment she knew precisely how to counter their first wave, and how to cope with the assassins reaction to her counter. She had planned the battle in her head up to the point where half the assassins were subdued, but she ran out of time to plan the rest.

She could feel the assassins were about to make their move, she would just have to fight on instinct once she reached the end of her plan.

The first move, there were a hundred assassins in the air above her, Doll’s determination to get through this battle was unbreakable, her Qi was stronger than ever before. All around her the beams that made up the roof of the dojo were pulled out and into the assassins flying at her.

To an outsider it would look like a tornado pulling debris in a tight vortex, but each beam was under Doll’s control. Each perfectly, precisely aimed at a threat to her life.

Doll was holding back though, she didn’t want to kill these men, they were only a proxy for the man she really wanted to get, Dolls attacks knocked the assassins back, but they were relentless, they wanted her dead and there was nothing she could do to stop them short of kill them.

Doll brought in all the dojo’s debris around her at once and formed a cocoon around her, it would take a few minutes for the assassins to break through it.

Falling to her knees, Doll began to cry. She didn’t want to become a killer.

“Don’t cry Doll,” doll looked up to see the ghost of the samurai standing before her, “I’ve seen you cry too much already.”

“you… you’re not real, just my imagination…”

“it’s true I am a part of you, but you know well enough that doesn’t make me unreal.”

“…I …I want to be with you.”

“We both know you have things to do first, those men out there, the world that created them has to change.”

“I cant take their lives!”

“their lives haven’t been their own for a very long time, they are nothing but robots, doing as they were programmed.”

“…I miss you already.” Doll lost more tears. “…we barely got a chance to know each other.”

“that’s why you have to keep going. You know it mustn’t happen again that way.”

–

outside the cocoon the assassins worked tirelessly to break in, but suddenly the cocoon became a hundred thousand large splinters, each aimed at the heads of all the assassins.

The assassins all fell to the floor, and Doll began her sorrowful journey to the place she sensed they came from.