Gary Brandt delivers his most viscerally devastating and morally complex chapter yet in this episode from The Dimension Of Mind Dot Com when a pre-dawn assassination attempt transforms seventeen-year-old Ella from a reluctant warrior into a killer, forcing her to confront the brutal reality that saving the world sometimes requires taking lives with your own hands.
The brilliant terror unfolds at 2 AM when Ella's prophetic dream—'They're coming to kill us'—collides with Helena's psychic awakening as five military-trained assassins advance through the forest with rocket-propelled incendiary grenades designed to burn the entire Patel family alive, including baby Chessa.
What makes the chapter so emotionally devastating is watching these teenage girls—still months from high school graduation—transition from sleepy confusion to deadly precision in seconds, with Helena's jammed weapon forcing Ella to take over, her psychokinetic abilities guiding handgun shots across 120 yards with impossible accuracy.
The awful finality of each 'Pop! Pop! Splat!' as bullets tear through flesh creates a sound that will haunt Ella's nightmares forever, while Asherina's blindingly green vacuum-energy weapon burns through targets and several feet into the ground beyond—exotic technology that could theoretically 'burn through planetary crust if mishandled.'
But the real genius emerges through the chapter's unflinching examination of trauma, protection, and the price of extraordinary abilities when Ella doubles over retching after realizing she's just killed two human beings while Alisha Patel demands to know why her teenage daughters have military-grade weapons and training she was never told about.
The emotional complexity deepens through the contrast between reactions: Asherina remains completely unphased because 'her motherly instincts to save her baby kicked in and killing someone wasn't even a question,' Helena appears contemplative and more worried about Ella's emotional state than processing her own actions, while Ella—despite all her training and supernatural gifts—struggles with the tender reality that 'seventeen remained a tender age, and taking a life left trauma that would shadow Ella forever.' Brandt brilliantly balances the immediate tactical victory with long-term consequences when Commander Beaker's promise to 'eliminate' whoever orchestrated the attack reveals how violence begets more violence, even among those trying to save the world.
The chapter ends with perfect emotional resonance through Ella's diary entry—her brain feeling 'like mush' as she questions her own identity while settling into a beautiful new house on the same day she killed two people—a haunting meditation on how the most profound life changes can happen in single mornings that forever divide your existence into 'before' and 'after,' when the person you were and the person you've become feel like completely different human beings living in the same confused, traumatized body.