"Firing the Twisties," said one of us, probably Mabruk.

Molly's sides exploded into thousands of tiny screaming pinpoints, ones that left curling paths in the air as they spiraled and corkscrewed to their targets.

That shit's cool! thought all of us.

And it was. The Twisties struck, pounding and hammering two of the war machines, mercilessly, relentlessly, their own combat drones allowing it, having been overtaken by our AI agents, their own drones attacking them as well, savagely tearing and burning with who-knew-what co-opted weapons the other side was using.

The two machines lost altitude. One of them hit the dirt and broke into huge glowing chunks. The other one straight-up exploded, sending shrapnel that Molly's shields blocked. We lost some drones that way.

"Two left. Stand by…okay, make that one left."

Because one of our furious Ai had simply broken into the system driving an enemy war machine and taken it over. It spun in place, faced its former comrade, opened fire.

So did all of us.

In the video, Todd's voice is shocked, unnerved and breathless. It sounds like he's running at this point in the fight. "Underhanded and duplicitous tactics!" he said, which were big words. Good for Todd.

The fiery nightmare that was Molly charged, never slowing, never having slowed. There was some time in the video spent with her mowing down the Washington Monument, which fell in three sections. The Capitol building burst into flame as she swept the dome aside with her horns. The White House was later found at the bottom of a crater; nobody knew right away when that had happened.

The Pentagon.

Molly finally slowed down, stopped. Stood before the oddly-shaped building, flanked by the hacked surviving Human war machine, surrounded by thousands of blue and yellow lights: the combat drones. She dripped flame into the night sky. The three cannons on her back were slowly taking aim, ready to sear the President and his supporters in their hidey-holes.

"You gotta be kidding me," I said with Lir's mouth.

Because Todd was standing between us and our target. He faced Molly, clearly terrified, but also surrounded by little camera drones. We hooked into his feed.

He looked pretty good: hair and makeup on point. That little scar of stage make-up still there on his cheek. He was adorned in a heavily brocaded trenchcoat that would have made Castro, Gaddafi, Michael Jackson or Sargeant Pepper proud.

"Stop! Stop this ceaseless violence!" Todd was saying. His cameras drifted to give him the most dynamic angle, the most dramatic lighting. "We're willing to talk!"

It was a pretty good shot: Todd standing up to the Kaiju-sized menace of Molly, his fancy coat billowing in the wind caused by her heat. He looked brave, heroic, doomed.

A voice boomed out from somewhere on Molly. My voice, whoever I was: "What's on your mind, Todd?"

"I am Preston Covenant, the voice of Humanity! Your oppression will not go unopposed! I speak for the United States Government, for the President himself!"

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"Your government has no authority, Todd. You only have the Chancla."

"We're willing to negotiate!"

"I'll bet."

"We ask for one thing: civility. Civility, not violence!"

TODD

It was Molly.

Todd flinched, the theatrical facade cracking. Real fear on his good-lookin' face. I remembered when he'd seemed so expressionless.

BURNED

"Were you being civil when you burned baby Molly alive?" Amalthea had already hacked Todd's video feed; a split-screen. Molly, burning and thrashing in the river when she was much smaller, screaming in agony.

"That incident was falsified, that's an AI video, clearly! Stand down, Mateo, and we can be civilized and discuss this!"

"Civilized. When you were going to degrade and humiliate the woman you came to love? When you were going eat a sentient being alive? When you tried to destroy not one, but two cities? Civilized."

"These allegations–"

The voice from Molly's speaker, and it was indeed Mateo's/my voice, sounded tired, bored, cold. "It's done, Todd. Over. Run for your life, if it makes you feel like you have agency in this."

BURNED

Molly set a building-sized hoof down next to Todd's media setup. The earth shook, the little flying cameras scattered, still keeping the shot. Solid work there.

We wondered as a group: what was his goal? Martyrdom? Theatrics around being the Little Guy facing the gigantic nonhuman menace? Thinking that we'd be reasonable, that we could be talked out of things?

After we'd flattened D.C, this seemed a little naive.

Molly leaned her vast head down, down. The two sweeping horns, curved like a colosseum around him, where Todd was a gladiator facing a beast, just like in ancient Rome. But the beast in question was Molly.

LOVED YOU TODD

I LOVED YOU

YOU HURT ME AND I LOVED YOU SO MUCH

Molly's first sentences. What a good girl.

"I…" Todd didn't know what to say. His face glitched, squirmed on that classic bone structure. "Not Human!"

Molly's cavernous mouth opened. Flames were within. Not just flames: roots, twisting and gnarled and vicious.

They stretched for Todd. Surrounded him. Seized him. Held him.

Todd writhed, shouting and screaming. The cameras zoomed in on his desperate face, his anger, his outrage at being treated with such incivility.

He was pulled in, disappeared behind Molly's house-sized teeth. His cameras tried to follow him in, but they weren't fast enough. They were able to pick up his faint screams, though. It was a really good set of equipment.

I felt it. I felt that he was suffering. I felt her hurting him.

Burning him.

I wanted her to stop. Todd was just dumb. But malicious and cruel. Mostly dumb. But it hadn't been me he'd tried to burn to death when I was an infant. It wasn't my score to settle, not exactly, and if it had been, well...

If it had been my score to settle, I would have been much worse than Molly. You don't mess with my guys. I'm not proud of it but there it is. I'm sorry, Human readers. I am.

His cameras cast about for a new subject. They decided on Molly's vast bovine face, the glowering, horn-crowned face of the Red Bull, burning and stony and intractable.

My voice again: "President Harrigan: yield yourself to the Chancla. Or don't. Your time is over."

We stopped speaking publicly, shutting down the loudspeaker. "This is it, if it's gonna happen," I said. Pretty sure it was me who said it.

And I was right.

The President set off that nuke.

It killed all of us, scrambling our atoms. Molly too. Todd too.

This, of course, was the beginning of Phase Three.

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