“Emma! You’ve got a minute to get over here or you’re just useless again.”

Emma flipped her hand over in the motion that pulled up the map. Without even looking up, she stepped back, activating her first ability and spending some of her shield strength to damage the mud-golem in front of her.

The mud-golems were usually more of an issue for mist divers, given their annoying propensity for splitting into smaller and smaller pairs, but Spatial Flux more than made up for it. An almost unfairly good close-range area effect damage ability, it was held back by sigmoid scaling and the fact that an average person’s calculation score would halve their shield strength, cut the shield’s damage resistance, and reserve 30% of their concentration score for its moderate damage over time.

It still ate up about a fifth of hers, but that was a reasonable tradeoff given the way she’d built this loadout to scale almost exclusively by shield-stacking.

That said, there was still no reasonable way for her to get to where Doug was obsessantly pinging her in under a minute and a half. It was possible, sure, but she’d get there with under a quarter of her shield strength and less than twenty energy left.

Technically, if Jonah was doing his job, there should have been a canopy-path that she could bounce off of with Wavedash, but she’d learned over the course of the last year that hoping for that would be a mistake.

“Can’t make it that fast,” was all she said.

It would technically have been possible for her to make it over there with reasonable shields, if Doug hadn’t taken some of the mist’s monsters, claiming that ‘as the carry’ he needed them more.

Not that that had ever stopped him from stealing from Jess when she was still the carry.

“Worthless bitch,” he started, but she’d already tuned him out by the time he got to the third word.

Doug was a fine player, but Emma had begun to have serious doubts about his ability to run a team.

Absentmindedly avoiding the slowly crumbling golems, she directed her attention to the map again, noting that while Jonah hadn’t managed to stay even with the other canopy ranger, he had managed, perhaps accidentally, to secure a path from the golems to middle lane.

Instead of trying to be heard through Doug’s continuing tirade, she just pinged Greg her intention to gank for him, getting back a ping within a second, confirming that he’d heard it.

Looking up, Emma judged the distance from where she was to the upper bridges, then kicked Wavedash on, flinging her into the air, where she grabbed onto the railing of the bridge, slipping underneath to start running along the half-metal pathway. A short jump like that still cost about a quarter of her shields, even as far into the game as they were, but that would be recovered by the time she got to her destination.

Jonah and the enemy ranger were trading potshots back and forth somewhere on the enemy side, at least. She could hear the guns going off around there, at least.

While running towards midlane, she used her penultimate ability, the first of the two “balancing skills” assigned by Arrows’ AI, to reshape her shields, changing it from the nearly skin-tight bubble she used in the mists to the layered hexagonal bubble backed by a large triangle she used for ganking.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It was a lot less effective at taking damage from behind, but it majorly increased the damage resistance from the front, which made it a lot more effective when she knew where the enemy would be. Cutting the layers and just making a true honeycombed bubble was better when she didn’t know where they were coming from, but it stretched that damage resistance further.

Another ping to Greg told him that she was in position, and he quickly switched from a seemingly desperate defense to the attack, firing off an explosive round that had the enemy midlaner diving forward to avoid it.

That was the wrong decision, really, even though Emma hadn’t been making her presence known enough for her target to know that.

The woman came up firing, and Greg’s remaining shield was quickly depleting, even though she was rarely shooting anywhere that would have actually made contact with his body.

Before that could go too far south, Emma boosted her shield with the active boost of her passive ability, multiplying her shield by a factor of five, then used Shard Bomb, throwing her shield towards the woman.

Given the downwards angle she was firing at, the woman didn’t even see it coming before it blew up, throwing her forwards and into the minion wave– which was good for Emma, because activating that ability fully turned off her shields for a couple of seconds. That specific combo ate up about a third of her energy to pull off, but with the woman visibly damaged and getting back to her feet in the middle of the mechs’ crossfire, it was definitely worth it.

Greg couldn’t hit her from his position, and she saw him repositioning to get a bead on her, but Emma’s shield started coming back from the secondary effect of Shard Bomb. Technically, the ability only restored half of the used shields, but when she could boost her shields from seventy percent more powerful to nearly six times so before firing, even the start of the recovery had a notable effect on her total.

Emma jumped off of the canopy bridges, activating Wavedash at the last second to avoid breaking her legs on contact with the ground and throwing up the damaging effect of Spatial Flux, grabbing the wand she’d bought as she did so.

The wand wasn’t particularly high-damage, but it was mostly for following up on her abilities and farming the mist monsters really early on, anyways.

Knowing where she was now, the woman turned to face her for a moment, glanced back at Greg, then swore. She phased backwards a couple of meters, then teleported a few more. Before Emma could get a real bead on her, she heard the telltale sound of a penultimate being activated, and the information appeared in her mind.

Given that this was a competitive match, she already knew that Cascade would let the woman avoid any damage from hits for a short period of time by automatically teleporting out of the way, but the confirmation was still useful– when speaking in words, it wasn’t clear if she could control the direction of those teleports, but with the information beaming into her head Emma knew that she couldn’t.

Another Wavedash into position, then, followed by a shot from her wand. Cascade was still active, of course, but while the woman was fast and agile, Greg’s own flash forward followed by three explosions had drawn her attention away long enough that she failed to manually dodge the small, low-damage bolt from the wand. When it hit, she teleported perpendicularly to the angle the shot had come from, away from the side it would have hit. In other words, directly towards Greg and his allied mechs.

Cascade went crazy, to Emma’s eyes, flitting the woman back and forth across the mech line avoiding both friendly and enemy fire.

It was a little bit disappointing nobody really used strawmen as minions. She would have liked to see what that ability did with twice the volume of fire.

Still, without any real control over her direction, the woman ended up getting ejected out the side of the lines almost the exact second that her ability ran out, and given that the average cooldown of a penultimate was three minutes, she was out of defensive abilities and still significantly weakened by Emma’s passive damage aura.

Greg finished her off with a shot from his sidearm.

Job done, Emma jogged back into the mists, heading out to the electric snapper.

“Damnit Emma, you stupid whore!” Doug yelled over the comms, “We would have been able to force this guy out of lane if you came here like I told you to. Now both sides of south need to base! Fucking useless.”

Greg didn’t say anything. Neither did she.