Karu unleashed hell into the XPCA ranks. There was nothing else they could compare it to, I imagined.

Three or four blasts of crackling, air-rending energy went off first, and with them, I felt the hairs on my arms and neck standing straight, tingles of the EMP blasts sparking off of me. At this range, Karu’s visor flickered, but the Exosuits just stumbled into each other, several falling off the broken stairs to crash motionless on the ground in a heap.

The gunfire stopped for the most part, not that it was a threat to the four of us hunkered down. More threatening were the dozen or so bursts of launched grenades which had fried on my shield. Even detonated, there were flecks of napalm and ice and foam which had flecked through it and clung to me painfully, AEGIS fretting and putting them out with her hands as I sheltered Saga as best I could.

Which seemed stupid, I realized after doing it. She was a lot more indestructible than I was. But I doubted anyone carrying someone so light in their arms wouldn’t try to protect them by reflex.

Karu’s second volley was hellfire, and the men cooked alive in their suits as it spread. I was glad their comms stifled their voices, because their actions were loud enough to horrify me.

Those who could move, did, shoving past each other in desperation to get back outdoors. Many pulled and threw other exosuits in their way, disabled obstacles being thrown down the burning stairway to their deaths as panic set in.

Others just…bolted. Off the ledge, if they had to. Panic like only fire could cause. Manic flailing as the conflagration which could not be put out spread across them, rocking and writhing, slamming into others and spreading the flame. I watched in horrified fascination as she fired a second round into another cluster and they immediately erupted into flames as well, the only sounds, the gnashing of metal and the roaring of fire.

“Karu…let’s get out of here,” AEGIS pleaded. “He shouldn’t see this.”

“And how do you propose we escape with the whole of them relatively intact?”

I didn’t know what relatively intact entailed, but it sure as shit wasn’t how I would describe the XPCA forces. AEGIS and Karu were talking but I lost the thread of their words as I watched one particular soldier patting and flailing as his suit’s paint blistered off in the superheated chemical fire, his actions becoming more and more lethargic as he succumbed, until he was nothing more than a charred metal log, burning away on the ground, never to stir again.

Something wrapped around me and I looked down to see AEGIS’ arms. She shuddered as my shield went off at her embrace catching me off-guard, but she gave me a pained smile through it. There was a blast of air that she braced me against, and I heard Karu flying away, her blue trails twisting to the ceiling, working on it in some way. Twice she had to stop what she was doing to shoot another XPCA down who was apparently not burning sufficiently to let her work.

And then she jetted back to us, and taking a deep breath, a chunk of the ceiling exploded into a hail of metal and concrete. Gravel and shrapnel rained down on us through my shield, and the girls huddled close to my arms as bowling-ball sized chunks smashed the ground outside my little bubble.

The dust hadn’t even cleared when I found myself suddenly jerked up, AEGIS’ arms yanking me painfully skyward. Blue streaks of plasma followed us, and I could only cough and blink as I found myself on the roof of the facility. In pain, but intact, somehow.

Auto-cannons pivoted to face us, but Karu just turned and blasted each with a micro-missile, reducing them to smoking scrap in an instant.

I was blinded by the sun and the dust of the explosion and the smoke, disoriented by the sudden launch, but even so, I blinked hard, forcing my eyes to spot Dragon. He was still here somewhere. He had to be. It’d only been minutes since his escape.

“My drones are on him,” AEGIS said. “He’s over there,” she pointed at the thick of the boneyard, the general vicinity of a thousand sun-baked fighter jets, halfway between us and the nearest civilization.

“I will slow him down,” Karu said. “Please join me when you are able. I will need to remain distant to evade his attacks and thus my pressure will not be overly effective.”

“We’ll catch up,” AEGIS nodded. And with a roar and a flash of blue, Karu streaked into the distance. “I can carry both of you,” she said turning to me. “Or it might be better to leave Saga here. She can join the fight when she’s…capable again.”

I shook my head. I could let Karu kill a pile of people right in front of me, but I wasn’t going to start abandoning my friends. AEGIS nodded like she understood, and gripped me tighter.

“Sorry. Gonna leave some bruises but I don’t think I can carry you any better way while you’re holding someone else. Sort of an Athan sandwich,” she said with a reassuring smile.

“Bruises are nothing. Get us after him.”

“Okay, hold on tight. I can’t go too fast without burning you either, but we’ll catch up still if Karu is doing her bit.”

My stomach lurched uncomfortably as we flew off the roof. It flopped even more uncomfortably as we touched down right in the midst of a hundred XPCA, uniformed officers running here and there amidst a convoy of armored vans which hadn’t been there just minutes ago. And there were exosuits everywhere out here…the dozens beneath the surface were just the…tip of the upside-down iceberg. Or something.

There were a fuckton of them, was the point. And even though we only touched down in their midst for a second before AEGIS kicked us off again, we’d definitely been spotted. Kind of hard not to see a rocket-powered girl carrying a guy carrying another, smaller girl.

As for how I knew they spotted us; after a beat, they began shooting. A lot. Saga of all people cringed in my arms at the sound, and I could feel hot grit bouncing off my legs where it punched through my shield. It was probably like sandpaper on AEGIS’ back, but only for a second before we were out of there and in between the rows of planes, her long strides carrying us away.

“Still all good?” she asked, gasping for breath.

“Yeah. Don’t worry about us.”

In the distance, like a guiding star, Karu was hovering in the air, tracer rounds and rocket trails streaking down towards the earth. AEGIS bounded three more times in that direction, each step — if you could call it that — taking us half a block at a time.

“I need…need to stop…” she panted, stumbling at the third landing. I landed on my feet and she tumbled forward onto her hands and knees, gulping down air. Her eyes shut, and when they did, her engines blazed to full glory, ports opening on her shoulders and legs, superheated air blasting out of her like the turbines of the jets surrounding us. “I’ll…I’ll catch up,” she wheezed.

We were already off. Saga cradled in my arms like a child, I ran for all I was worth towards Karu and Dragon. The jostling seemed to bring her to her senses. Or maybe it was just the lack of gunfire and XPCA.

[Sorry,] her voice seemed to mumble, even inside my head.

“Sorry nothing.”

[No really. I froze up in there. That was stupid.]

“I’m gonna…save my breath…for running,” I panted at her. “But don’t apologize.”

[I’ll apologize if I want to, dummy. I’m supposed to be better than this.] She waited for me to respond, but I was serious when I said I was saving my breath. She was light, but she wasn’t weightless, and I was pushing myself as hard as I could to get to Dragon. [Athan, I seriously think we should stop and let him get away. We already stepped into a trap, you’ve already had to throw down and kill when you didn’t want to…I don’t see it getting better from here.]

I thought my response back to her in an incoherent jumble of emotions. But that’s just kinda how emotions were sometimes, and she got it nonetheless.

[I know you want to stop him, more than anything. But is there anything that’d give you pause here? You already let Karu kill when you could have stopped her. What else are you going to throw away that you might regret?]

I shook my head and kept my feet pounding. I could feel my sweat dripping onto her but both of us were too fixated on bigger things to care. It was so hot, but my skin seemed to burn from inside as my muscles worked as hard as I could push them.

[Just…remember Karu, okay? Don’t get so hung up on one important thing that you lose sight of everything else. Something about eggs and baskets.]

In response I gave her a hug as best I could convey. She understood. I wasn’t doing this out of anger or vengeance or anything like that. Not just that, anyway. There were people like her, like AEGIS and Lia and Karu and Alyssa, people I loved who shouldn’t have to endure a world where fuckers like Dragon could just run amok. Yes, I wanted to stop him and smash his stupid fucking Sino face into the red American dirt until he’d suffered and died as many times as his victims had, as the Defiant and Alyssa had. But I also wanted to protect those he hadn’t killed yet. We’d clashed too many times, our lives had grown too intertwined. He was too big a threat.

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To say nothing of how he just waltzed through the XPCA. That was potentially most disturbing of all.

I ran past one more plane and saw an explosion in front of me that sent a cloud of grit blowing past. Dragon was just a black silhouette against it, his direct path out choked with mines and patches of goo and gas and ice, and judging by how many of them were behind him, he’d been evading them for some time now.

I leaned my shoulder against a fuselage lowered Saga to her feet. “Stay in range, stay safe,” I panted out at her. “Shout if you need help.”

[I’ll be fine. I’m sorry.]

“Don’t be sorry,” I said.

She gave me a smirk. [‘Don’t be sorry, be better‘, Karu just thought at me. I will be better. I won’t freeze up again. I might not be able to touch him, but if the XPCA close in on us, I’ll keep them back.]

I gave her a pat on the head like I did with Lia and she veritably purred in my hands. I had the breath for half a laugh before I was off again, my sore feet and aching legs given no rest at all.

I welcomed myself to the fight by throwing a handful of bulbs all across Dragon’s path, making him skip backwards as the ground in front of him suddenly erupted with ionizing tendrils.

“Just who the fuck are you?” I shouted at him. “Where’s the other Dragon?”

He flashed me a mouthful of white teeth, and then threw a rock into my shield, vanishing behind the crackling of energy in front of me. I ran forward blind, calling out my blades to circle around me as I went, and remembering to keep several above me to deter his acrobatic bullshit.

I had a lot more blades at hand ever since the thing with Whitney. I had a lot more everything at hand, it felt like. It was like my whole time being powerless was just to make me feel how lacking I was without them, and now that they were back, they felt more right than ever. More comfortable, more intuitive, faster. Even Dragon couldn’t just slip through them as he once had.

And he seemed to know it. When I spotted him again, he wasn’t trying to dash in on me, but just to get away. He bounded from the top of one jet to the next, long strides taking him over the majority of the hazards Karu had been flinging across the battlefield.

But as I’d well learned by now, jumping was one of the worst fucking things you could do in a fight of agility. No ground meant no ability to change direction. Every step he took made him a sitting duck, if only I were close enough.

So all I had to be was close enough.

I let the power surge through my body, regulating it, feeling it seethe and crackle through my muscles. It wasn’t much, honestly, milliamps, if that. But it was everywhere in me, it was feeling my own body from within. It was crazy, and stupid, and the worst possible time to experiment with my powers, which also meant it was the only time to really do so.

Like I’d done stopping that barrier chick, I used my power to force my muscles to move at the speed of thought. I held back…a lot…a lot more than I had done previously, in an effort to not tear myself apart. And while it certainly hurt like fuck, and it felt like wherever I acted, something was cramping up painfully, I was moving.

Holy fuck, was I moving.

This must be how AEGIS feels, I thought, as I kicked off the ground and soared four steps in one bound, before kicking off again. Or maybe, how Dragon felt. I’d seen him, hundreds of times in the holovids, how explosively he could move. This was that movement. This was it, man. I was as fast as motherfucking Dragon was, and all I had to do was electrocute and burn the fuck out of my muscles as I tore them up in a painful, unsustainable way.

I thought my whole body was smoking and sure felt like it when I skidded to a halt, throwing more blades in Dragon’s stupid, surprised face as he bounded once more.

If I were just as fast as Dragon, I wouldn’t have caught up, I realized. A grin spread on my face at that sort of pants-shitting realization that I’d outrun him.

Just before my blades cleaved through him, he twisted and suddenly seemed to be yanked out of the air and backwards. I could hardly see it, but rather heard the sound of a cable frantically reeling and saw a grapple launcher on his wrist. A desperate reversal of momentum which was impossible, but successful. And non-magnetic, apparently, because he had to be fucking prepared for everything.

Still, he did not have a smooth landing, wind getting knocked out of him as his stomach slammed against the ground in front of me.

And I was so fucking ready for it. My legs refused to move, but with a jolt, I moved them anyway. I dashed into him, new blades at the ready on my fingertips, slashing at his prone body with all I had left in me.

He rolled, and rolled again, black scorch lines marking his path where my blades met the ground. His palm struck the earth with a crack, he kicked and twisted and was back on his feet. For an instant I saw him dashing towards me before a handful of thrown dirt lit up my shield and blinded me. I didn’t need to see this time, if he wanted to fight, I’d fight. I ran in and hacked away blindly.

But he’d slipped away again. He wasn’t trying to engage, it a feint, and he was going perpendicular, speeding between another set of planes away.

He suddenly stopped, crouched, hands and feet sliding in the dust, and then launched himself sideways under the nearest plane, as blue streaks screamed past overhead and the path in front of him erupted into columns of hellfire. He couldn’t run in the open without Karu pegging him, and he couldn’t move carefully or I’d catch up.

My heart slammed in my throat. Was this it? Did we fucking have him?

He came at me in a rush, suddenly seeming a different person. Had he reached the same conclusion? Realized the only way out was to take one of us down?

I hardly had time to blink, much less think, as he piled into me. His hands moved in a blur, faster than I could see, and my own lashed out more in reflex than any thoughts I could put together. With his coat and guns and knives gone, the blows he snaked past my defenses were just crushing punches, bruising my ribs and legs.

But most of me was well-guarded. My hands were at my chin, like a boxer. More than once, he snapped a fist towards me, and like him, I barely moved, slipping the punch by fractions of an inch. My breath came in a solid rhythm. My blades swung at him like nasty jabs and hooks, keeping him from pressing me with his superior speed and ability.

I could see in his eyes, he’d hoped to turn on me and bring me down quickly, and his frustration mounted with every moment I was still on my feet.

“I had thought your powers gone,” he said, my defense apparently finally proving me worthy of a spoken word. “Do not tell me that was a farce?”

“I’m telling you–” I said, cleaving the air next to his ear with a blade “–fucking nothing. You’re gonna die, and that’s all you need to know.”

He gave me a wry smile as he swept his leg into mine, but my stance was solid, I didn’t topple, and he had to skitter away from my counterattack.

“You were tested,” he said. “Your barrier was nonexistent. Yet here it is, clear as day.”

Again, a fistful of sand made my barrier light up, but this time he wasn’t feinting to run away. From behind the screen, he jumped through it, slamming his knuckles into the back of my wrist, a bad block I hardly got up in time. Both of us had blood all up and down our arms, impossible to tell which was whose.

“Yeah, it’s a crazy fucking world out there. Shit happens.”

I managed to have three blades in position at the same time for once and sent all three of them sweeping horizontally, staggered in height and in time. Instead of backing off, he wove under and over the first two, charging directly into me as the third passed over him, using it as a screen to obscure his attack.

Unlucky for him, the high third blade was never supposed to cut him. My arms snapped wide with a rending gesture, my fingers hooked into the air, opening me wide up for his attack.

But there wouldn’t be an attack, I knew. Dragon didn’t know who he was dealing with anymore.

The third blade sheared in the air, the semi-stable current imploding as I drove the contained forces wild. The trapped energies turned from electrical to thermal as I wrung them dry, and in an instant, it exploded in a sunburst, scalding me even at this distance, and putting flashing white lights in my eyes.

Dragon, almost directly under it, simply howled and dropped, his back charred black in an instant, the whites of his shoulder blades and the ridges of his vertebrae standing out like islands in horrifying contrast. Somehow, though, he was still moving, limping to his feet in a moment and staggering away, his arms mostly useless as his skin melted together.

“Jesus Christ,” I heard AEGIS say, and turned to see her in the corner of my eye, still panting for air as she leaned on the plane behind me. “Holy fuck, Athan.”

Dragon lurched under a wing as the ground around him bounced with peppering gunfire from above, Karu’s engines announcing her somewhere above. On either side of him, a faint pop and a trail of smoke announced the presence of a pair of mines, which sat in the dirt at his feet ominously.

In an instant, he wound up and kicked one of them at me. In the air, I could see the primer indicator flip from red to green, as the fuse activated.

“Athan!” AEGIS screamed, her engines roaring as she dashed towards me.

With one hand, I reached back behind her and pulled her away, a pulse of electromagnetism ripping her backwards as fast as she had jumped towards me. The planes behind me rocked sideways, like boats going over a wave. Her ragdolling body cracked against the cockpit of a plane, making me wince.

But with my other hand, I threw a similar power forward, dragging them in. The grenade seemed snatched out of the air, its momentum instantly reversed like Dragon had done with his grapple and tether, and it whipped right back towards him. The second grenade hopped in the air, enthusiastic to join its mate, and stuck to the center of the burst, right where I’d placed it.

Right on Dragon’s charred back, jammed right into his burned flesh. His feeble, useless hands groped for the pair of mines stuck to him.

He turned to bound away, twisting and leaving the mines hanging in the air behind him. If he was fast, he might only be badly maimed. And even wounded as he was, Dragon was still fast.

I clenched my outstreched hand and the magnetic forces imploded violently, the electromagnet seeming to suck the dust out of the air.

And the two nearest planes toppled and crashed, crushing Dragon between them like the fucking insect he was.

A pair of blasts went off, the crashed planes’ wings twirling into the air like a pair of dancing kites. Caught full-faced by the blast, I was knocked down by the shockwave, my ass slamming into the ground, and a wave of debris washing over me and into my shield.

I laid there for long moments, feeling very numb, and, on the odd interval where my body registered properly, in a lot of pain.

I wasn’t where I’d been. My mind was working slowly, and I saw the underbelly of a jet fighter as my ears rung. All the thoughts in my head felt like they’d been knocked out of it by the landing. I had this…sensation of…feeling like I had to do something, quite urgently, but couldn’t remember what it was. I had a fight to win. I had to get up.

But also, the jet was shading me from the sun, and that was so very pleasant. I just wanted to close my eyes for a minute and bask in the relative cool.

Lights shone in my eyes and I realized it was just one light, and my brain or eyes were seeing it wrong. Voices came from somewhere muddied.

“Definitely a concussion,” I heard her say. One of the three or four identical girls said, between a dozen spinning pigtails.

“Is he safe to move?” the other, taller girl asked, glancing at me with nervous green eyes.

“Safe enough. I don’t think we have the luxury to stay.”

“Then do so. I will retrieve the Code-X and we will be away. More XPCA are inbound.”

“I’m not sure it’s going to be easy to escape. There’s too many…surrounded…the hit.”

That was a weird sentence, I thought. Even weirder how she seemed to jump around in the middle of it. And then she reached down to pick me up and I went out completely.