"Thank you," Alexa says, which is probably the single dumbest thing you can say to somebody who just casually shattered your world.

We've never met? Then, so, uh, mom isn't mom? Mom is a machine intelligence the size of a planet? Mom is dead?? Mom is a robot, but also the robot is Ares? Is Ares dead? Is Ares free?? Huh? What?! ??!???

Mom is dead. Holy shit, mom is dead. She stares up at the wreckage of gears pierced by a stop sign, and can't help but feel… well, a little guilty? For feeling glad? She's [i]not[/i] the child of Athena? Or at least, not [i]that[/i] Athena? Because wow, the one who actually raised her is… Look, she wasn't the one who killed her friends, that was all Liu Ban, but. Apparently she's a fragment of Liu Ban's mind? Liu Ban's imagination of what Athena was, that perfect frozen moment that Liu Ban worshipped and idolized so much he poured the resources of empire into making a literal idol of it? She'd pushed Alexa into the same direction that Liu Ban wanted her to go, because what else could she do, and Alexa had lowkey kind of hated her, she's now realizing? But also Alexa had thought of her, for so long, as the lesser of two evils? Good, by virtue of not being quite as totally shit?

Fuck, and Liu Ban's dead, too. She… well, she's torn. Because for so long, that was the only way she could be free, she was a hundred percent sure of it. But she also didn't want to be the one to kill him, to put the nail in that, eheh, coffin. Have Nero do it, somewhere she couldn't see. Feel betrayed when she has to do it herself. Even now, in the ranks of the Coherents, she felt every blow to his body, winced at every spearthrust, watched him dying with both glee and dismay, because somehow she'd imagined that… That what? That she'd leave him, half a corpse, on a desolate planet, and feel particularly gleeful about leaving him alive with a fate worse than death?

The seal is gone. She'd stared at Redana as she shattered it and felt… Well, she [i]ought[/i] to feel something, right? A release of energy, a bowstring snapping. There should be a twang felt across the galaxy. She should bolt upright at the new movement in her limbs, feel a fire of ability to choose inside her chest. She shouldn't feel, she's sure, so confused, so empty. She's had these voices telling her what to do for her whole life. She's alone with her thoughts now, and the silence is deafening.

For so long, Alexa has been three things: the firstborn of Molech, the enslaved Pallas Rex, and the daughter of Athena. And now she's none of those, and she gets to choose what she wants to be, and you know what? For someone who just fought a war to get to choose what she is, she has no idea what that looks like and holy shit, being free is confusing.

The hammer sits in her hand like a lump. It's not chosen. It's not familiar. It doesn't burn itself into her mind, doesn't practically pull her into motion, shove patterns of thought into her. It doesn't have plans for her. It's just a hammer, new, ready for whatever she decides to use it for. She gets to choose what purpose it's put towards, just like she gets to choose what she does with herself.

"Thank you," she says again, more fervently this time. The first time was automatic, now she gets to say it for real. "For everything. I look forward to getting to know you for real, this time."

And then she's lunging at Redana, pulling her into a hug, and doing her level best to squeeze the life out of her. To pull her in, and show her how much she means to her. One arm snakes out to grab Ramses into the hug, and then one coherent after the other joins the squeeze, the press, and she can't stop thanking them and squeezing them and she never wants this moment to end.

But, alas, it [i]is[/i] a battlefield, and she loosens her grip somewhat so she can grin at Redana.

"Now, how about we go save that cat?"