The burns and other damage that Ningsing Academy's professionals had suffered sufficed to quell their pursuit for the night, though they would continue again tomorrow morning.
Before this, however, there was discipline to be doled. In the middle of a shitty hotel room, much like the ones they had been forced to stay in for most of this mission, stood Mei with four men and another woman. She called them by Vortex, Electroshock, Ornamental, Ten-Mile, Eternity. She did not refer to them by their names but by their Revenants; they held no other purpose or value than that, and even this poorly.
As she injected Ten-Mile's burns healed, she cursed at them in Mandarin. "I could tell you idiots to kneel to pray and you would slam your heads into the concrete!" She slammed Fuxing's syringe deeper into Ten-Mile's cyst, causing him to groan in pain as his skin gradually regenerated.
As she stood up, she kicked Ten-Mile away from her as she glared at the others. "Allow me to clarify how things stand. Jackflash disobeys my order for where to attack the plane, and he is dead. The gambler does not wait, and he is dead. Our resident necromancer was reduced to bits after she idiotically waded into the fray herself, thinking herself a killer rather than distraction, and she is dead."
Ten-Mile coughed out. "Y-You distracted her yourself, the way you tried to pull her back-"
Mei turned to him, and her voice thrummed low. "Because she was to be a distraction, not a killer. If you need to know the distinction, I can gladly provide a demonstration." She kicked him in the stomach, then stomped over to the woman called Electroshock. "And then there is you. Perhaps the only worthwhile Revenant of this bunch, and yet when I give you the simple order-"
"-Sato just moves so fucking quick, it's that-"
"Do you think I am stupid?" Mei smacked her. "Do you think I am an idiot?" She smacked her again, and continued the further she pressed her against the wall. "I provide you intelligence, I give you a simple order. Sato's location was to be verified before you attacked for precisely the reason you all saw. Then, after she kills two hosts due to your assistance, you decide to join the fun they have at Urasaria as well and kill another one of us in your idiotic eagerness. To call you traitorous would imply some intention to your incompetency, no doubt why your natal Revenant was removed before, and perhaps this one shall be removed as well."
"So what? You think you're smarter than me?"
"I do not think, I know. And yet you are not even the most embarrassing member of this little group."
She looked to Eternity. He was a mountain of a white man who had fled the States to China years ago, known at Ningsing as an idiotic hothead who acted before he thought. He had settled into the position many traitors have as a vessel into which both sides' hatred are poured; it was unlikely Urasaria would have treated him any worse than China already had, nor even known of his existence.
"Not one use of your Revenant across this entire mission." she said as she encroached upon him. "Explain it again to me - perhaps you can provide amusement to the others."
She noticed as the others listened closer; she had learned to exploit how the others despised Eternity, for they knew that if she were focusing on him, then she could not focus on them. This was the attraction of a hierarchy set only by a single mind and imposed by force upon others; no human would join such an arrangement nor create one but if they could believe they were smarter than all others in it.
Eternity did not speak Mandarin well, but said: "The short little bitch is countering me."
Mei laughed, then the others. "Your entire Revenant, rendered worthless by the ability of a little dyke? A man of all that muscle and stature, reduced to the level of a civilian by one woman? Perhaps they should have given your Revenant to a Ningsing student, one could make use of it rather than a gweilo who crumbles at any adversity. No better than a common criminal or thug, certainly, and twice as idiotic. That's all you are, an idiotic man who thinks he's hot shit. Perhaps the only use I can put you to now is using you as target practice for-"
He smacked Mei across the face, and she recoiled, then tackled him to the ground; Fuxing's syringe formed and she slammed it into his right arm, causing tumors to boil down the length of his skin and rapidly grow. He tried to shove her off, but she clung to him, stabbing again and again until his right arm exploded in an eruption of pus and gore; a horrific groan came from him as she rose up and kicked him in the head, then stomped his face in as she screamed at him.
A shriveled bud of flesh began to grow from his frayed stump of a shoulder, collecting sinew into itself as it lengthened and grew, a shriveled branch of flesh upon his muscular frame; its skin occasionally hyperventilated with the realization of what it was not.
She looked to the others as she stomped his face in again and again. She had often felt that as a woman in a male-dominated field, she needed to be even more masculine than men to succeed, as if she were expected to preemptively disavow her gender and the assumption of embarrassment with it.
She looked to Vortex and said: "Beat him."
She stepped off from him, and Vortex kicked him in the stomach until he bled. When he was done, Mei directed Ten-Mile to do it, and Ornamental, and Electroshock, until the hierarchy was obvious to themselves, the acts of destruction as a method of crystallized creation.
Yet she felt a burgeoning in herself; after ordering them to continue and for Electroshock to continue her tendrils' search, she left the hotel and went for a walk. Were she not her on official business, she would have liked to have visited a national park or the likes, for since she was young, she had always felt it easy to be withdrawn into the scenery around her.
She found eventually a spot with many trees and wandered into it. Age and stress should not have made her self a thing beyond recovery, no matter the idiocy of those who had been assigned underneath her; in some moments she had become so frustrated that she wished she could send them all to be murdered by Urasaria students. Over half of her assigned squadron had died, but having known many of them at Ningsing, she could not say anything of value was lost, merely frustration that they had been assigned to her in the first place.
She saw a hive hanging upon a tree, and below it were a group of bees upon the bark, humming in unison. She looked to them, and she wondered at their intelligence. She recalled when she had been stung by a giant hornet when she was a child, and her brother had held her as she cried. He had taught her his axiom regarding the two creatures; hornets were assholes and bees were friends. Mei smiled at the memory.
She felt she should examine it closer, however, and so she did. She realized that beneath the ball of insects was another bee, the vibration of their bodies heating her to death, until its corpse fell from the bark and they dispersed away from her body. She had temporarily anesthesized herself to the level of this reality, yet was taken by realization of her own.
There had been her time as a nurse at Zhengzhou, and the Revenants she had stripped from superfluous students. There were the groups of illegal migrants in Jilin and the task of regrets she carried out with the woman in Gansu.
There were the humiliations she conducted across Tibet. There were the sexual comments and disrespect from those higher-up than herself, but always had she steeled herself towards a greater ideal.
Events flitted in and out of her mind, their existence seeming to be a thing of necessity; she had never seriously thought of them as choices but dictates, mandates to her being that she had no qualm partitioning outside the rest of her self. She could make no motion against them and her strength did not suffice to bend them; that was alright so long as she did not go outside her own circumscribed limits.
She wondered if it were better to commit acts of sadism with no particular allegiance to them or to commit them because one believed in them. Fear and its followers emerged in her mind, and for a moment she thought of defection, even as the thought offended her own concepts of decency and honor. Rationality swept away from her mind, and her tilt towards panic was - then was not. She remade again the scene of the bees she had witnessed, recontextualizing until she could swaddle herself to its suggestion, thinking she could similarly discard her fear like the corpse of an insect, a scaffolded reality that would suffice until she could smother the other under the lid of sleep.