The first time they fight he sends his mind right down into the bottom of the intruder's lungs and gropes all the air from them with needy thrusts. And Snake's eyes bulge and his face turns scarlet and then white as he chokes, and fails to scream, as Mantis pushes down on his organs until they burst like ripe fruit inside his torso. It is the full extent of his power and no-one will ever see.

Snake lies on his front for six minutes, occasionally shuddering with pain, unable to move, and the puppet-girl hangs limply on the strings of his mind. She despairs beyond measure, and so does he. He supposes that is why he kills Snake in such an empty manner – it speaks to them, if not those ones who lie beyond. He knows what he is; Snake goes through motions, talks of squares and triangles, noughts and crosses, symbolic hieroglyphs that define his actions, as a prayer to the 'gods' – but in his mind he is not actor but character. Mantis cackles as Snake's soft lips ooze near-purple blood into the cracks between the marble slabs, and he looks out through scarlet eyes when he finally, silently dies.

They fight again, and again, and again. They are being observed now – yet, Mantis thinks, their actions are not being made definite. He doesn't understand why this is fair. Why can't he survive! Where is the ending where he murders everyone? A psychic can only read as far as the lines of references and codes and the pages of interviews go. Between pages, he sees an old man with a gun in his mouth. Cubed, he sees a white-haired beauty staring from the edges of the simulation. Here, he sees nothing. Snake has not yet even made his partner definite – that's not just you, that's how everyone is, spoken in a painful double-voice of woman-man, good-bad, A-B, canon-not, ammo-camo. It makes him sick to think of it.

Long fingers warp the air into a ball of energy, and it strikes him with a puff of red. His scream echoes – nyaaaaah!---aaa!---aa!--aa – warps into a blur of unnatural strings, another voice screaming his name.

Mantis feels the frustration rolling off the mind beyond. Childlike, adult, male, female hands holding grey, black.

He has one choice, and that is to lose, while playing by the rules. He cannot throw the match. He cannot win. In order to defeat him, that mind needs to learn what he has always known, what they know but pretend is false to perpetuate their own little escapist fantasies, what Snake does not know.

The clue is written right there, the thing they have to see, and it is, for now, OVER.

Snake has no eyes, and no mouth. He cannot respond of his own free will. He's a puppet either of the slowly learning people or of the god whose name Mantis invokes to black a mind, a desperate plea that they would get it. His fingerless hands lift the gun and he fires.

"No! I cannot read you!" Mantis screams. He does not fear his own death, although he is sad he cannot live on in his own fiction. He longs for an end to it which fitted his goals, not Snake's, not theirs. They, who cried over lives they had been forced to take (oh Wolf), and grieved none over deaths that were their own choices and their own mistakes (CONTINUE | Exit). They take no responsibility for their actions, and he told them -

You are careless. You are a poor warrior as well. You are somewhat reckless. Did you enjoy playing -

Did you like it?

As Mantis dies, he stares wearily at the nothings that are his eyes, the way the join of his head and neck snarls as it connects, the sharp angles of his hair and arms, three marks for each cheekbone, like a tally for each fortress. As they talk, their mouths do not move. They nod up and down as if to say this is good.

As Mantis dies, he works his way back into the fiction, but he knows that for once, that mind outside saw the world for what it really was. He is nothing, and therefore his death means nothing.

The mind outside does not move its puppet until it has changed back to the other controller port.