One moment, we're standing there on the courthouse steps, the entire YD team and the DVD broken out into a heated argument. Playback stands defiantly with me, his feet planted, and even as Rampart and Gossamer side with Multiplex, and Crossroads and Spindle scuttle into the courthouse like rats fleeing a sinking ship. I see Fury Force at my side - a mother bear staring down our faults. The crowd chants and screams, the roar of it washing over me, and Multiplex's stoney glare on the other side. The old versus the new and the new versus the old.

Shattered glass. Pure, high-pitched screams of terror and pain. The splintering of wood - I swivel just in time to backhand an entire park bench that comes hurtling through the sky towards us, smashing it into splinters. The sound of more broken glass, the tinkle of countless windows falling to pieces throughout the vicinity like crystal snowflakes.

In a heartbeat, everything changes. The tension, the standoff, the self-important dick measuring - it all falls away in an instant, replaced by pure, unbridled chaos. Playback and I lock eyes for the briefest of moments, a thousand unspoken words passing between us in the space of a heartbeat. No time for petty squabbles now. No time for anything but action.

Spindle comes barreling back out of the courthouse doors, his face a mask of raw panic. "Fuck," he stammers, pale and shaking, and his shoulders so tense they're nearly up to his ears. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, this is bad, this is so fucking bad."

Even as the words leave his mouth, I'm already moving, shouldering past a stunned Multiplex and leaping down the steps three at a time. All around us, the crowd is erupting into pure pandemonium. People are screaming, shoving, trampling each other in their desperate bid to escape whatever fresh hell has just been unleashed.

And then I see them.

The Philly Phreaks.

Pumice trudges through the crowd like a battleship through a sea of rowboats, riot police trying uselessly to push him back - the armored response teams, where are they? - rubber bullets and tear gas canisters pinging harmlessly off his stony hide. But it's the figure perched on his back that sends a bolt of pure, icy dread shooting down my spine.

Deathgirl. Daisy Zhen.

She glares at me through the chaos, emotionless. Not a hint of feeling on her face, a porcelain mask of nothingness perched atop a terrifyingly inhuman form. Her Burger King crown sits lopsided on her head, the battered paper rustling in the frigid wind. Bloodrush in my ears as the world slows down like I'm in a computer simulation lagging to a crawl. My heart beats slow and sluggish. Or maybe too fast.

I whip around to Multiplex, intending to say something... but he's already running. I stagger forward, trying to move toward him, but Spindle comes up to meet me instead. Fear dances on his brow in liquid diamonds, a sheen of sweat shining in the pale light of the sun. His beanpole legs are barely more than spindles themselves, quivering erratically. He looks as scared as I feel. I reach out to steady him with one shaking hand.

"They're here, Sam," he gasps out, each word torn from his throat like shrapnel from a wound. "The Phreaks. They - they've done something. Something horrible."

My gaze flicks back out towards the sea of bodies writhing in agony on the streets. My nostrils flare as a sickly-copper tang coats the air - I don't need any special senses to smell that. The screams rise in intensity, but now they're competing with a new sound - wet, meaty pops exploding out of the crowd.

As if on cue, a woman at the edge of the crowd doubles over, retching violently. And as she straightens up, I catch a glimpse of something... wrong, a hideous distortion rippling across her face like a heat haze. Boils swell and burst across her forehead, a second pair of bulging eyes sprouting from her cheeks at a nauseating angle. Spindle makes a noise like a kicked dog behind me.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Multiplex half-turns towards me as he divides, his selves splitting apart at the seams. A miniature army of grim faces staring back at me. "Crossroads in my ear - says those lunatics force-fed the protestors Jump. It's a goddamn terrorist attack on civilians in the open. I don't give a fuck about your politics anymore," he spits out. Then he turns and charges into the fray, his duplicates fanning behind him like the teeth of a saw blade. I feel sick.

"Multiplex!" I scream, my voice raw and ragged with fear and desperation. "The civilians! You need to get them out of here, now!" I make a frantic waving motion with my hands. "Evacuate!"

He opens his mouth to argue but even as he does a boy no older than fifteen suddenly crumples to the ground, blood pouring from his nose and ears as his face starts to simply slough off his skull like overripe fruit, a horrid mess of liquified flesh slopping to the ground with a nauseating wet splatter. It holds itself together as he dissolves into something closer to jelly than a person. Three hours of that. Can you even pull yourself together afterwards?

Multiplex nods, expression grim, and then he's shouting into his earpiece, coordinating his duplicates and the crisis response teams as they converge on the scene through the chaos and horror that is unfolding throughout the city, the blood and the screaming and the wanton destruction. They're just not fast enough with all the bodies.

An old man tries to crawl towards me, babbling incoherently. His arm suddenly snaps at a ninety degree angle, bones pushing up through his flesh and the bloody stump where his hand should be splitting open as three tiny, malformed fingers erupt out of the torn meat. I force back vomit. I force back tears.

Pumice and Deathgirl march forward, plowing into the heart of the crowd like a pair of icebreakers slicing through a frozen sea.

My blood sense is going haywire now. There's too much noise, too much chaos. Too much blood. I can't pick out individuals anymore. It's like trying to find a single thread in a tangled skein of yarn. A sea of red behind my eyelids, a pulsing mass of death and suffering.

I'm hyper aware of my lungs sucking in smoke and flames almost as much as I am of the wounds that still ache and twinge from my last fight with Pumice. Pulses from my rapidly palpitating heart down into my veins, my muscles swollen and primed for violence. My liver positively throbs in my torso, like it's been wrapped with barbed wire and set on fire.

Where are the armored response teams? The EMTs? It's a nightmare. A war zone. Cars are overturned. Storefronts shattered. Alarms blaring, a discordant symphony of high-pitched electronic wails. And always, always, the endless chorus of screams. Of agony.

I catch a glimpse of Chrysalis out of the corner of my eye, her grotesque form made even more horrifying by the blood and viscera smeared across her chitinous hide as she grapples with Rampart. Chimera is there too, a whirling dervish of animal parts and snarling fury as he tears into riot squads like they're made of tissue paper, tossing them aside with gorilla arms and bear paws, his tailbone turned into a snake, lashing out behind him.

Gossamer is nearby, doing her best to drag the worst of the wounded out of harm's way while frantically trying to render first aid, but it's like putting a bandaid on a gaping chest wound. There's just too many. Too many hurt.

And still, Pumice and Daisy just keep coming. The whine of chopper blades overhead. The thunderous boom of heavy ordnance. The rattle of gunfire. It all blends together into a hellish cacophony of violence and death, an unrelenting assault on the senses that threatens to overwhelm me entirely.

A crowd scatters in all directions even as a detachment of riot officers try to circle around Pumice, slamming their plexiglass shields into his rocky hide. He doesn't even spare them a glance as he casually backhands one, sending him flying through the air like a ragdoll.

She just stares at me from across the carnage, Pumice continuing his implacable advance even as I slide into a fighting stance, every muscle in my body coiled and ready to strike. A hideous amalgamation of flesh and nightmare slowly piecing itself together as it devours life.

I wonder how I'll be remembered.

"Samantha. Devonte. Traitor." The voice is flat. Dead. Like everything else still in this blasted hellscape. Pulled from some child soldier's nightmare.

Daisy - Deathgirl. She stands atop Pumice's shoulders, a psychotic grin splitting her cherubic face from ear to ear. The burger king crown she wears sits askew upon her lank hair, like a blasphemous diadem forged in the sulphurous bowels of Hell itself. Her eyes are wide and feverishly bright, gleaming with a sort of manic, hateful intensity that borders on the inhuman.

"Missed me?" she sing-songs, her body swaying back and forth in a grotesque pantomime of childish glee. "I know I missed you."