Eldre Koh’s face is stretched out on a monitor screen, where he can be seen holding his light blade to Theo Daniels’ throat. “Give me what I want and I will kill him for you.” The demon of the Nitobe repeats his offer to the Senior Partners of Wolfram & Hart, who he knows with certainty are watching him from somewhere.

In a bleak white void, in a place it’s inhabitants call the Saarinen Hell dimension, two demons are watching a floating image of Koh’s demands. They are accompanied by a bird of prey, sitting atop a perch. This is the White Room, and the bird is the current conduit for the Senior Partners. The bird darts its head from one demon, who’s standing, to the other, who’s on a laptop, connecting to TinCan to communicate with Earth. “Can we give him the information he seeks?” asks the bird, in a human-like voice, not the squawk you might expect. The demon flanking the bird tells it that Eldre Koh was imprisoned millennia ago, according to their files and records department. It may take some time to find the info they seek. The bird is anxious: TinCan must be protected at all costs. As one demon starts hunting down the info, the demon at the laptop messages Koh back over the speakers: “Very well, Eldre Koh. We will find the information you seek.”

In the server room of TinCan, Eldre Koh has Theo as his prisoner as the demon’s words come over the speakers: “Then you must kill him. And everyone else who knows our vulnerability.” Buffy is standing opposite Koh, her hands raised. She pulls on an exposed piece of metal from the wall and it juts free in her hands, still sparking from where it’s been disconnected from it’s source. “You’re not killing anyone,” she snarls at Koh through clenched teeth, stunned by the demon’s sudden betrayal. “We can figure out who betrayed you without trusting the biggest bads around.” Koh looks at her. “Not if the boy severs our only link to the Hell dimensions.”

Buffy tilts her head slightly. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Koh raises his blade closer to Theo’s skin. “Leave Slayer, or he dies now. I will deal with you later.” Before Buffy can move, Theo makes a noise, telling her to go. Buffy insists that he’s her client and she’s not leaving him there, but Theo says that now she needs to protect everyone else, not just him. “If I die, someone has to destroy TinCan, and you’re not going to do it with a pipe.”

Buffy looks at Theo, then at the pipe, still sparking in her hands. “Fine. But I’ll be back before the Senior Partners give Koh a reason to kill you.” As she leaves, Koh warns her that she may return, but she will not succeed. Buffy throws the pipe to the floor and exits the room, anger written all over her face.

Upstairs, in a room full of damaged and dead tentacles, Buffy’s face is the first thing Kennedy sees as she awakens. She tells Buffy that the last thing she knew was that she and Koh made calamari out of the Teuth demon. Buffy tells her that her new bestie just got downgraded to worstie, since he’s the one that knocked Kennedy out. She explains that as one of the Nitobe, Eldre Koh lives by a code of honour – that, apparently, has lots of fine print that Buffy wasn’t aware of. That’s when she delivers her bombshell to Kennedy: Koh has Theo.

Kennedy is amazed: “And you left him?” she asks Buffy, anger rising. Buffy explains that Theo told her to and that they need to make plans to destroy TinCan with or without Theo’s help or survival. Kennedy is frustrated: Buffy has missed the little guy by looking out for the bigger picture. After the Seed, she thought Buffy had maybe learnt her lesson.

Buffy gets annoyed: they’ve already talked about this countless times, and she’s getting bored of it. “And I thought we already had the Willow conversation.” Kennedy insists she’s not talking about Willow at all. When Buffy asks who she’s referring to, Kennedy’s face goes stern and her eyes become more centred on Buffy’s. “Giles,” she says calmly.

There’s no words in the moments that follow; in fact, the only sound is of Buffy’s fist hitting Kennedy’s jaw as she punches her square in the face. As Kennedy rubs her face from where she’s fallen on the ground, Buffy states with purpose that she’s not going to let anyone die. They’re going to go in there, shut down the demon telegraph and save Theo. She doesn’t help Kennedy up. Kennedy still has her hand to her head, still smarting from Buffy’s no-holds barred right hook. In the two minutes since the blow, her left eye has bruised up considerably, the purple mark on her skin quickly coming to the surface. “We save Theo, what you do afterwards, that’s up to you.” She tells Buffy that Wolfram & Hart have the building wired – Koh will know they’re coming. Buffy suggests he won’t if they follow the tentacles.

In the red-lit server room, Koh is waiting for the Senior Partners to conclude their research. Instead, they inform him that the Slayers are heading in his direction. The demon doesn’t speak back, but does ask Theo if the Slayers can penetrate the server room from beneath. Theo scratches his head, thinking and clearly nervous about his impending execution. They’re surrounded by ten feet of reinforced concrete in every direction. “TinCan built the most secure server farm next to the N.S.A. That was my idea,” he says, a definite hint of regret in his voice.

Koh has his back to his prisoner. Theo comes up to him, quietly, respectfully, asking Koh why he was imprisoned – he thinks it must have been something really bad for the Nitobe demon to be willing to kill someone he doesn’t even know. Without warning, Eldre Koh turns around, waving his arm and flinging Theo back against the wall behind him. His voice is raised in considerable anger: “Do not try to get close to me. I know your kind’s tricks. You will attempt to talk me out of what I must do.”

Theo rubs the back of his head, fired with adrenaline suddenly, the blow to his head waking him up. “If you’re going to kill me, I think I get to ask why,” he demands. Koh looks down at him. “And you think I care about your wishes?”

He walks away from Theo, but then stops suddenly. He turns his head slightly, so that Theo can see the pain in his eyes. “No one needs to know why I was imprisoned,” he states softly, pain echoing through his voice and into the small metallic box that is the server room.

In the foundations of the building, a mass of wreathing tentacles are stretched out, like a giant web, beneath the concrete. Kennedy and Buffy are navigating them until Kennedy stops: they should be just below the server room now. Buffy looks down at her shoes, covered in tentacle slime. “These things are stickier than I thought,” she says, squelching her face in a disgusted grimace. Kennedy smiles. “Just be glad you didn’t get dragged near this thing’s mouth,” she jokes. Buffy looks worried all of a sudden, and bravely asks Kennedy if she’s going to get fired after all this. Kennedy says that depends on whether Theo’s brains are inside or outside of his head at the job’s conclusion. Some slime lands on her face from overhead, and now it’s Kennedy’s turn to pull the grimace. She swipes the goo away with her hand. Shining her flashlight up, she points out the reinforced concrete in the soft beam of light.

She turns to Buffy and asks how they’re going to cut through it, but Buffy is already half way up a tentacle that heads through a crack above them. “We don’t have to,” is her echoed reply.

In the White Room, one of the demon subordinates races in with a piece of paper. He has identified Koh’s captor, and not only are they surprised by their identity, but they also know that the entity in question is currently on Earth. The bird conduit tilts it’s head and the demon on the laptop sets about communicating with Koh. In the server room, his voice booms through the speakers. “Eldre Koh, we have the information you want.” Koh stands firm, asking the voice to show him. The voice refuses: not until after he kills Theo Daniels. Koh, however, narrows his eyes. “After I get the name. If you don’t tell me,” he says, staring at a screen where an image of the conduit has now appeared, “I will destroy the servers myself. The conduit almost looks nervous, considering it looks like a bird. “Very well. It has been sent.” On another screen, connected to TinCan, a message begins to download.

As the download hits the half-way point, Kennedy appears in the doorway to the server room, brandishing her gun. “Can’t let you do it Koh,” she says firmly. Koh looks at her briefly and orders her to leave. “Or I will blacken your other eye.” Kennedy points at the shiner on her face with a grin. “You mean this? You didn’t do this,” she retorts as Buffy comes from the side of the room undetected, kicking Koh in the head with a satisfying crack. “I did,” she says, seriousness now in her tone: she’s not messing around. She grabs her axe and points to Koh from his landing point on the ground. “How many times do I have to tell you? We’re not killing the computer geek.”

Kennedy races to Theo’s side and asks if he’s okay. She’s ready to get him out of there, but Buffy insists that she destroy the servers first. “Koh, kill them now!” the Senior Partner demands, it’s voice now strained and desperate. Buffy yells back at Theo: “Someone want to shut him up?” As Theo starts to work on it, Kennedy tries to get him upstairs – she can’t protect him in the server room. When he resists, Kennedy reluctantly gives him two minutes.

Koh, meanwhile, has formed his blades of light from his hands. “Wish I knew that trick,” Buffy says to herself, clutching her axe in preparation. She doesn’t have to wait long as the pair launch into the fray, charging each other in the limited space of the corridor. In the server room, Theo pulls the switch and Kennedy asks for a time frame before the servers go boom. Theo tells her it may take some time for them to overheat.

Buffy and Koh are both evenly matched in their fighting, with Koh telling Buffy that she will not stand in his way. Buffy grabs a hold of his wrist as he strikes, using Koh’s own weight as leverage to throw him over onto his ass. “I would have helped you find who you’re looking for,” Buffy tells him as they continue to struggle on the ground.

She attempts to push his fists away from her, the blades coming too close, with one slicing a cut in her forehead. As Buffy falls to the ground, she places her hand to the wound, which has started bleeding badly. “Kennedy,” she manages to whisper.

In the server room, the machinery is starting to smoke and catch fire. Kennedy raises her gun in Koh’s direction and tells Theo they have to leave, but Theo wants to ensure the overheating can’t be reversed. As he continues to tinker with the devices, Kennedy tells him that she doesn’t care about Wolfram & Hart – her job is to protect him! She yanks at the switch that controls the heating process, ripping it off the wall in one gesture. “Let’s see them fix that,” she jokes as she drags Theo from the room. When they reach Buffy, Kennedy races to her side in concern. Although Kennedy helps her up, Buffy tells her to go without her: she’s the one who messed up by letting Koh in, so she intends to end the problem.

In the server room, Koh is banging on one of the monitor screens. The servers are overheating too much, and the download with the identity of his captor is stuck. Buffy tells him that it’s too late: the connection is breaking up. She points up, towards the speaker, which is still transmitting, the voice fading out due to the damage. Koh yells in defiance and insists the answer is inside the screen. But it simply shows nothing but static now. He smashes it in anger.

“Whatever it is that sent you straight to demon jail without passing go, happened a long time ago. Let it go,” Buffy tells Koh firmly. He says that that is easy for the Slayer to say, but she tells him that nothing is worth all this violence and all this rage, not even an ancient code of honour. Koh yells loudly into the air. “It’s more than honour,” he screams and Buffy quietly asks him to explain. “It’s something you will never understand Slayer,” he says quietly and races away, escaping through one of the many cracks in the foundation.

Outside, as TinCan burns, Buffy apologises to Theo for his loss. Looking up at the flames, smiling, Theo Daniels shrugs. “Why?”

All around the world, users of TinCan are greeted by an error message when they try to log in. Kennedy later confirms, home at DeepScan, that the connection to the demon dimension is closed and offline permanently. She turns to Buffy who suddenly looks nervous. “So why do I feel like I’m about to get in trouble?” Kennedy looks at her bluntly. “You almost got our client’s head chopped open by a guy with magic pizza cutters for hands.”

Buffy looks down. “It’s bad, isn’t it?” Buffy figured she wasn’t cut out for guarding people anyway and is firmly happy to be fired, although Kennedy tells her that’s not why she asked to see her. After she let her bosses at DeepScan know exactly what happened, they decided they wanted to promote Buffy to Senior Operative! “Theo may be broke now,” she explains, “but he’s got a lot of friends who aren’t.” And he told them all about what Buffy did. “Now every Silicon Valley CEO and venture capitalist with a dot-com wants to hire you to protect them.”

Kennedy admits to being rather impressed. She hands Buffy a cheque, her wages for the TinCan job. As Buffy looks down at the cheque, her eyes widen and her face goes into shock! “This much money fits on one cheque?” she asks. Kennedy tells her that if she takes her new job, that wage will become a regular thing. Buffy looks at the cheque and then looks up at Kennedy. “I can’t do it.”

Kennedy looks stunned. “Is it because of what I said about Giles? Because I was out of line. You made a tough call and we need someone who can make decisions like that.” Buffy tells her that Kennedy was right before: she is used to saving the world instead of just one person. She says that when she was younger, things were easier. But now she’s older, she sees the world differently and she doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. “And if I took this job, I’d be doing it for one person: me.”

Kennedy is disappointed, but seems to understand. “After all you’ve been through though,” she asks, “Don’t you think you deserve that? To finally have the kind of life you want?”

Buffy looks at her. She has a smile on her face. It’s not just a happy smile, it’s a confident one, the smile of someone who’s just figured out what she needed to. “Maybe that’s just not who I am,” she says pointedly. She looks Kennedy in the face with intense conviction. “I’m the Slayer.”