Since there was just an instant left before my ally's rapid disassembling at the mercy of an undead horror, I only had enough time for one single action. Yet, I needed to act twice in order to save him. Simply warning Sixes would not be enough. Carrion had to be stopped.

The solution I found was inelegant, but obvious. The oft-forgotten third instinct was always reliable. Yes, there was fight or flight, always, but people tended to forget that in the face of the unknown, the first very thing they did was freeze.

In a rapid extension of my power then, I called out to both Sixes and Carrion at once. I had to hit them with the same message, knowing that only one of them would be expecting a voice in their head. That gave the soldier all the time he needed. Carrion's momentary confusion at the bellowing cry in his mind, "Behind you!" provided enough of a pause for Sixes in turn to react.

He found the tangle of limbs and teeth clinging where it was on the ceiling just a car's length behind him, and he let loose a spray of bullets. The creature moved terribly fast, however, springing down from the concrete to hit the floor and skitter under a nearby car. Attacking it further would have been nothing but a waste of ammunition. Even as he survived, Sixes now faced a much larger problem than one single villain.

The other two had heard his fire, and they were coming. He didn't need me to tell him that.

While Carrion was threatening to come at him from any number of hidden spots in the parking garage, they would soon be attacking him from the front, too. He needed to find another way to ground level and escape. This was where being a human tank came in handy, as all Sixes had to do was leap from the third story vantage in order to make his way directly down.

He mantled the railing and let himself fly, landing with an impact that could be heard all the way over by Stumblebum and me.

"What’s going on?" the rogue asked, realizing that our cover was blown.

"The villains know where Sixes is. They know that I'm here too now," I said. Carrion was moving so quickly that once again I had lost track of his tiny body. Psychic space was not merely an empty black void these days. It was more like a ghostly realm of impressions. Hues of blues, red, green, and all the other colors of the rainbow would appear and disappear, taking on strangely familiar shapes. They were like faint emotional outlines describing cars, doors, and other things of frequent use. In all that noise, it was hard to find the villain.

This was the downside of becoming more perceptive with my power. I had learned to shut out the exterior world and focus so that I could take more information in, but the consequence was that I gathered excess input. Still, it was interesting to learn that objects could carry a psychic impression. Knowing this was huge, and I didn't doubt it would end up being of use. For the time being, though, it was a hindrance.

"Keep an eye out for Carrion," I told Stumblebum. "He's not on my radar anymore. He may be coming this way."

"Oh, fuck! That is... That is exactly what I least wanted you to say right now. I'd really rather not fight him, Headcase. Like, it’s a strong goddamn preference."

"Just warn me if he gets here, alright? My focus is too split. I need to help Sixes." And with that, I went back to my old standby; covering my ears and screwing my eyes shut. Only then could I find Skiddles and Chrysalism in the muddled black.

Skiddles, the little gremlin that he was, was shaped more like a potato than a human being. He was a gaunt, ugly little man as I remembered, with thinning hair and a face like a pug. He was no joke in combat, though. He came with an entire arsenal of weapons.

Being a technological type of super, the kind that Torque was often mistaken for, Skiddles was a serious wildcard. We knew already that he had acid at his disposal from the way the building was attacked, but at any moment he could pull something else out of his ass completely unrelated. Unlike some of his ilk, this technicist lacked a coherent theme to his inventions. All that remained constant was the fact that he made his equipment from trash and scrap.

Sixes learned this the hard way as the building he was moving through took a heavy hit. It had been shelled.

Unable to read the villain’s intention due to the complexity of choices he had at his disposal, all I had foreseen was the will to commit harm. There was no way for me to stop Skiddles as the impact happened so quickly and from such a large distance.

It was launched from a mortal two blocks down where the villain had set up his equipment. From there, the bomb fell on the structure and pushed it in one direction. Rather than leveling the building or bathing it in fire, it forced the structure to fold in on itself like a house of cards, burying the hero alive.

I could hear him in his mind, calling out. "What was that?!"

"That was Skiddles, and he hit you with a mortar. Can you get yourself out?" Chrysalism was fast on the move, and God only knew where Carrion was right now. If Sixes didn't answer yes to my question, he was all but done for.

Never wavering, he answered me with a show of force, and it was unlike anything I had imagined he was capable of.

Throwing off steel beams, wood, and brick, the unpowered hero pried himself from the rubble and rent his way back to the open air. His enhancements, used to their fullest extent, were something to behold. Between his cybernetics and his biological distortions, it was not an easy feat, but it was truly comparable to what a natural super might have achieved. This was the combined work of all the government's best tech rolled into one.

"Chrysalism is coming up on your right," I warned.

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It was probably smarter for him to run, but his aura told me that he was looking for revenge. Ultimately, that was the whole reason he was out here in the fight, bending the rules and risking his ward. He aimed to make the villains pay for the death of his friend. Saving the city was second on his mind.

Chrysalism loomed as she came closer, and though the aura of the villain was small, the shadow she cast was twice the size of any man. She appeared as a fetus floating in an amorphous body of water, drifting in its murky center. It was an alien vision, altogether, but in the end she was a human, just like any of the rest of us.

Age was no factor on the restriction of a power's manifestation. That was her truth. Chrysalism's emergence twenty years ago had made the headlines when an entire hospital was destroyed from the maternity ward outward. Since that time the child's mind had clearly developed, and she was no longer just a roving murderer, yet her appearance never changed. While her thoughts were just as complex as anyone else's, her body remained a fetus enwrapped in an impenetrable barrier of amniotic fluid.

"HEADCASE!" I heard a muffled cry. It was Stumblebum.

Immediately, my attention was ripped back to reality. I looked around in panic only to find that he was leaping towards me. All I saw in that instant was a bloody figure standing behind him, then my whole world shifted. Teleportation stole all sense of direction from me.

As soon as we made contact, both of us reappeared out on the rainy street. The momentum of his tackle carried on as we reemerged, causing us to fall and roll. This lasted only for one rotation as, suddenly, we stopped in our tracks. When Stumblebum came to be on the underside, my whole body halted as his slipped into the concrete and arrested our movement. With his grip on my shirt, he was saved from falling away into oblivion, but I was nailed to the floor, unable to escape.

This doesn't make any sense, I thought. Passthrough is dead.

And yet somehow, he came out from the building with a smile on his face. This bloodied figure who had been standing behind Stumblebum, touching him mid-leap, was not what he seemed, though. Quickly I understood the truth, and my fear increased.

"Carrion," I said, raising a hand crackling over with electric pain. "Stay back!"

The dead villain’s body had indeed been possessed. I had no idea that it was possible for Carrion to use the powers of a dead super. Everyone knew that he could manipulate dead flesh, of course, but this was on a whole different level.

In his mind, Stumblebum was screaming as he started to run out of oxygen. "Don't let me fall! Don't let me fall, Adrian!"

The struggling I did to pull him up achieved nothing but tearing me free from my shirt.

Under the pouring rain, the zombified Passthrough began his approach then. Hit with the first blast of pain, he twitched involuntarily, but he just kept on moving anyway. I could see where Carrion had wormed his way into the corpse's brain. He was like a cancer, hijacking nerve cells and converting them into his own strange pseudo-life to slow their decay. Growing out of the body's back came a long, clawed arm, formed from the remnants of his smaller amalgam of limbs. The two had fused completely.

I didn't know what was worse in that moment, the thought of him using Passthrough's power to send me careening into the blackness of the earth, or for him to stab and meld with my dying body, as he was known to do.

I decided to keep either of those things from happening for as long as possible. I knew how to stall for time, at least.

Instead of blasting him with an emotion like pain, I remembered that I had already had my hands inside Passthrough's nervous system. And, though he was dead, little had changed since then. I still had the power to override his volition, and I took that power to freeze all his muscles. Carrion attempted to wrest control back from me, but all he succeeded in doing was dropping the body to the floor in a seizure. Until he had converted the flesh fully to his own clay, Carrion was merely a foreign invader in this system. The difference between us was that my power was smarter. It allowed me to trick the body into thinking my influences were natural.

While Carrion was locked into sending signals from whatever territory in the body that he already controlled, I could send my signals from anywhere with a precise zap. If he wanted to send a command to walk forward arcing down from the brain, where he had embedded himself, all I had to do was cut him off at the knees. Literally.

The real trick was finding out if I could split my focus enough to keep up the fight with him and also save Stumblebum. Doing so would require a one-armed deadlift, as my other hand was busy firing off bolts.

I gathered what fabric I could in my grasp and twisted it over itself in a makeshift rope strong enough to hold the rogue’s weight. My only choice was to try and raise his head high enough that he could get a clear line of sight for a teleport. For that, I just needed to give him a few precious inches. The rest he could do himself.

His consciousness was quickly fading. If that happened, he would surely slip. There was no telling how long it would take at that point for his power to unbury him…

Little by little I hauled his immaterial body from the road. His head began to crest. His arms struggled weakly to finish the pullup he needed.

Right as Stumblebum was about to come up, Carrion finally decided that he’d had enough.

He cancelled the effect of Passthrough’s power and sealed Stumblebum to his fate. Suddenly, the stone was rigid again and his arms were immovable. His hands opened and closed in desperate claws, but there was nothing I could do. Stumblebum's mind slowly went blank as all his muscles screamed in futility. He would be dead in just a few seconds.

As would I be, without his help.

Faster than my attention could shift, Carrion latched himself onto my leg with a sickening crunch.

So distracted with saving Stumblebum, I hadn't seen him put his final plan into action. Knowing that Passthrough's body was useless to him, he detached his snaking, hideous appendage and formed a fanged mouth. Now that he'd found my leg, I felt rotting putrid meat grind against the open wound he'd formed. He coiled around me like a snake then, disgustingly slick and cold.

My own screaming filled my ears, and the pain was blinding.

Using our skin-to-skin contact, I pushed my power to the max and flooded Carrion’s mind with everything I could think of. He was not some kind of supernatural entity. He still had to cram enough neurons into his mass that he kept his sentience, and that meant my power had something to work with. Even if pain hadn't had any affect before, there had to be something which would faze him.

Although he was closer to an animal than a man in this state, animals still felt fear.

So, I hit him with pure fear. Memories of my mutilation, of losing my parents, of uncertainty, joy lost, sadness, anger, and confusion. All of them were framed like a threat in his mind. They said, unless you let go, these will be yours.

My leg cracked further as his body tightened down. With no more ideas remaining, I drowned his sensory organs in signals that crashed down like titanic waves of sound and pressure.

All of that was barely enough to force him to break away contact and slither back.

After all this, I was at his mercy, and he took his time as I writhed in agony to reform himself. His body changed into a tangled spider made of splintered bones. A small eye popped out from his side, and his monstrous mouth gesticulated a mangled set of words.

"It's over," he said. "You... lose."

I looked at the festering bite on my leg, following his gaze, and understood exactly what he meant. The flesh began to bubble.

I had been infected.