She jumps eight feet straight up and sprints along the tentacles towards the main body, using all four limbs and digging her claws in. The tentacles are really the perfect texture for running, too bad she can't appreciate them more.

Should she abort? It knows about her now, but she might still have the advantage of surprise, and she doesn't understand the situation - it should be possible to carry an aquatic over here to make the killing blow, but she was suggested for the role instead. Either this thing is mostly cat, or it needs to die urgently.

Twenty feet away. She pulls the trigger on the bomb.

Ten feet. She swerves to aim herself at the next gap over - the pair of tentacles she's on are still pressed together.

Five feet. She unclips the bomb, letting it fall towards the gap, and jumps as hard as she can, grabbing on to the shell and clambering to the center, where she dives face down with her hands under her body and eyes shut.

Boom!

The south half of the creature is destroyed. The shell is thrown upwards.

She jumps off the other side, the head end if it has one. Any eyes?

(The bomb might actually have been too large, a direct hit could have killed the octopus?)

It has two sunken eyes. Its remaining front tentacles writhe.

Back she goes to claw at the eyes then, before the creature dies on its own.

The badly weakened creature squirms in pain, pouring out blood from the fleshy pieces where Alia attacks. By the end, it stops moving, and the strange sensation of new powers flowing into her body comes to her again. No vast explosion of horrifyingly noxious gases! Alia will probably get a bunch of tentacles or something silly, but she's removed the threat for now. Other than the aquatic Magical Girls fighting of the stragglers, the battle is over; luxurious vans arrive, driven by some of Thomassia's deadliest soldiers, driving the currently-transformed Magical Girls to their accommodations designed for the medical issues that come with absorbing the energy of these monsters.

Fucker fucker fucker fucker

She was hoping there was a great plan that they simply didn't have time to tell her about.

"No. I'm obviously going to die. I don't want to spend my last hours pretending to believe doctors who are pretending they can treat me. Get Kyra. My girlfriend. Luthier Kyra 433701, you should have all her info already."

She'll get into a van if it gets her to Kyra faster, but otherwise insists on running around testing out her new powers.

Her fingers can stretch out, growing rows of extra claws along the sides! She can hear pitches far lower than human range! She can hold her breath for as long as she tries to test it!

That is very cool. Seriously.

"With my new powers, I can hear a sound below human hearing. It's a repetitive thrumming. I can tell its direction" huh how's that work "it's coming from inland, the direction the activated octopus was heading."

The van waits for Alia, ready to race her as rapidly towards Kyra as its powerful engine permits. One of the soldiers calls Kyra on the phone, wanting Kyra to be waiting for Alia near the edge of the city. He wants Alia to enjoy every second she remains strong and transformed like she is now.

"You can hear whatever the octopus was heading towards? This is could be the most important discovery we've ever made!" He calls someone on the phone, asking the person on the other end to try using as many sensors as they can think of to discover a signal coming from the direction the squid was headed in. Meanwhile, the capacious van remained comfortable as always, dedicating plenty of space to let Alia sprawl out however she wanted in the interior.

Sprawl

The sound is conducted more through the ground than the air and is coming from a forest in the middle of the island.

The racing vehicle eventually ends up in front of a wall of high-rises suddenly emerging from grasslands and fields. Kyra waits in front of one of the white buildings with many sharp edges, wanting to embrace the opportunity to meet with a transformed Alia.

"Hey."

"I'm proud of you."

"Thanks." For not calling her brave, or making a fuss. She did her duty.

"I'm here now. I'll be here the whole way. I don't know what's going to happen, but we keep getting better at handling aquatics."

"I had it good. Enough meds to need two whole sugar packets to hold them all." She snorts. "Lots of people are perfectly happy on long-term dialysis."

"It won't be the same. But we can make it work, okay?"

"Okay."

And after a lot of cuddling in the garden, with fifteen minutes to spare, she reports to the prep area, still clutching Kyra's hand.

Her skin is now too tough for a normal human to pierce, but the permanent hemodialysis catheter in her arm still works.