#hit count

The number of the beast...

It’s AO3 (and, huh... well, the Bible!) that tells me so. Sorry, I don’t make the rules...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The pain was still there, but it was nothing compared to how good she felt.

She still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened back in her home. One moment, she was having an open conversation with the Nightmare Knight; the next, she was out and about in the city, a newfound energy propelling her along the city streets as though she’d been touched by a livewire. Even the sights and sounds of destruction she saw as she bounced and leaped from pillar to lightpost to precarious edge of a building couldn’t dampen her spirits as she passed. 

She felt strong. She felt alive. But most importantly in her mind, she was feeling generous.

That whim in particular is what finally brought her to a stop as she caught sight of a brawl in the far reaches of her vision. The drones that plagued the city like rats were swarming around some poor citizen out in the middle of the street. For most, a gang of that number would have surely spelled out a quick death, but this lone man--perhaps some sort of feline?--seemed to be holding his own fairly well. Every time one approached too close, it was either met with a crushing blow from the man’s fists or the hard shell of one of its cohorts as he threw it with such reckless abandon that it looked like his body might bend in two from the sheer effort.

But for all its impressiveness, Bunji could tell a pace like that wouldn’t last. He’d slip up before long. 

And that’s what they were waiting for.

The fight continued for what seemed like never-ending minutes before it happened. One punch that sent yet another of he drones flying into the gloom, but he’d overextended himself. There was no way he could recover before one of the creature’s talons slammed into his back.

If she hadn’t decided in that moment to propel herself off the building and meet the beast with a punch of her own, he may well not have recovered at all until the respawn system decided to work its brand of magic on his corpse.

Not a dumb question — a good question!  Based on this part of the AO3 ToS:

We use cookies to store visitors’ preferences; customize web page content based on visitors’ browser type or other information that the visitor sends; and record activity at our sites in order to provide better service when visitors return to our site