Atop the police station, Terra fought a losing battle against a huge, fire-breathing T-Rex. All Milly had to do to help her was cross the street, and a ten-story deep gulf, and flames that were hot enough to melt sand into glass.
Easy.
Milly paced back and forth, debating with herself.
“Maybe I could just throw rocks at it? Seemed to work for those flame sprites,” she offered while she walked forth.
“Great idea!” Milly snarked as she spun on her heel and walked back. “All that time being on the baseball team as a pitcher working on my accuracy will finally pay off! Oh wait, that was the track team, wasn’t it? I’m as likely to hit Terra as the T-Rex, even if it's the size of a barn.”
“My aim isn’t that bad!" she argued back to herself. "Though, I guess I don’t really want to risk it at this distance.”
Milly paused and pulled out the spyglass to check on the fight. No progress, of course. “Let’s call it a last resort option.”
Terra looked bad. Her hair and half her uniform had gone up in smoke, leaving only molten glass where her skin used to be. Speaking of the smoke, it was beyond Milly how Terra even stayed on the roof without choking. Neither the dinosaur nor the girl seemed to be bothered by it.
“Right… I should hold my breath if I’m going anywhere near that.” Milly made a mental note. Smoke inhalation at superspeed was just as bad.
Come to think of it, she probably should have paid more attention to it while she was dealing with the flame sprites too. It just hadn’t been something she’d been actively afraid of at the time.
“I can’t be wasting time like this. I’ve got an idea on how to cross.” Milly retrieved her makeshift grappling hook. Thanks to Orchid’s vines, she had a better way to navigate the busted stairs, anyway.
Milly found her way onto a balcony as far away from Terra as she could. She ran her hands over the cool metal of the bent crowbar. “Here goes nothing.”
She swung the crowbar across the gulf between the buildings. The attached rope followed in a straight line after it, but it unraveled when it was nearly across. The crowbar completed its journey alone, straight into a top-floor window.
“Close enough!” Milly wrapped her end of the rope around the balcony’s handrail. She hopped onto the rail herself and stared at the tightrope she now had access to to cross a ten-story drop.
Milly shivered.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. She could see the rope coming apart from the abuse she’d put it through twice now. It also would not stay straight like that for long.
“I’m obviously insane…” Milly lamented as she hovered one foot over the rope then looked across to the other side. Did her power even work this way? In theory, the faster she went the easier it would be to keep her balance, right? And she was going faster than anyone.
She looked past the rope to the street below. Heights were not traditionally on her list of fears, but she was willing to make an exception when the fall would take long enough to write a last will and testament mid-tumble.
“Nope!” Milly stepped back. “There’s gotta be a better way of going about this.”
Coward.
Milly bit her lip.
Even at her speed, all of this dilly-dallying was adding up. Terra had to be hurting badly for a full second by now, but did that mean Milly should gamble on something she hadn’t tried before? What if it didn’t work?
“I reckon that roof’s gotta be hot as Hades as well. I couldn’t even walk down that flame sprite infested hallway… Heading over to her might not work if I can’t come close.”
Milly remembered that during the first conflict with Meatcrawl, Stella had implied Terra had a limited supply of sand. A lot of that sand was turning to glass before her eyes. “Maybe I could help her restock from a distance? Just throw sandbags at her? Ah, but I don’t know how her power works; what if she can’t use just any sand? Or it takes a while to absorb?”
Back to pacing.
She wracked her brain, trying to remember anything else she knew about ACE’s powers that might help here. Stella was the obvious choice, but she’d have all the same problems Milly would have.
Surveying the area, Milly spotted a better option.
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Back on the street, kind of.
“Heard Pa say once that we stand on the shoulders of giants,” Milly mused to herself while she admired the view from atop Abigail’s shoulder. “I reckon this ain’t quite what he meant, but it sure helps.”
Thanks to a generous donation from an idle firefighter, Milly wore a brand new outfit. Old man Welder used to call it ‘bunker gear’. As a fire-based Super, he probably had his fair share of experience with them.
As far as Milly was concerned, the only thing she cared to call the gear was ‘heavy’.
She pulled off her helmet and wiped her forehead. “Geez, I might drown in here before I’ve got the chance to burn to death… huh?” She interrupted her complaining when she noticed there was nothing to wipe away. Even after climbing all the way up Abigail’s coat while in this heavy gear, she literally wasn’t breaking a sweat.
Thinking about it, the training session on the track in the morning was the last time she could recall where she ended up drenched. Even though she’d definitely exerted herself a lot since then.
“That’s weird.”
Milly doubted she traded her sweat for powers. An experimental sniff proved she definitely still smelled as though she had a busy day. Just like with her sleeping, fingernails, (and hopefully her aging,) it looked like not everything about her functioned at superspeed.
“After I’m done here, I should start a list. But for now…”
Milly put her helmet back on and climbed up along Abigail’s sleeve. She made sure to stay on the side that wasn’t facing the burning building. When Milly reached the palm of Abigail’s hand, she shimmied around the handful of survivors and hopped through the ninth floor window of the police station.
Thick plumes of smoke obscured the ceiling while flames licked at the walls. Milly also spotted a couple of downed flame sprites by the stairwell, evidently bullets worked just as well on them as rocks. It clearly didn’t make them any less hot, since the fire originated from them.
“So that’s why the police couldn’t get out.” Milly frowned. “These flame sprites use the stairs to get around, so they’d block the stairwell even if there’s nothing to burn there. Woah, I guess it’s lucky that the stairs in the apartment building were broken or they would’ve spread out like, well, wildfire, I guess.”
Stolen story; please report.
Milly wasn’t sure how long she’d stand the heat even with the firefighter’s bunker gear, regular people didn’t stand a chance.
Taking a deep breath, Milly sprinted past the flames and up the stairs. It might as well have been a chimney for all the smoke and soot that clouded her vision.
Milly took a phantom step on a stair that had apparently come to an end already. She stumbled forward and caught herself on the metal doorframe.
Even through her thick gloves, Milly felt the warmth seep in. Like touching a car bonnet on a sunny day, and quickly getting warmer. She immediately let go, but the warmth stayed at the same level. At least it wasn’t getting worse anymore. She stepped through the doorway, onto the roof and out of the smoke.
Unsurprisingly, the situation had changed little in the three seconds or so it had taken to get here.
The only thing worth noting were the little glass walls. From a distance, Milly had assumed they were spots where Terra had tried to create cover, but now she could see strange hollow shapes inside the glass, like see-through casts.
“Were those flame sprites?” Milly circled one glob of glass. The void inside definitely had the same shape, but it was empty. Milly looked over to Terra. “You smothered their flame with sand, so they vanished? Interesting. Too bad they were still hot enough to glass the sand.”
Speaking of Terra, she’d shielded herself with a solar panel that she’d obviously ripped out of the roof. It didn’t look like either of them would last much longer against the torrent of flame coming down on them.
The T-Rex looked off. Not just because dinosaurs didn’t breathe fire (and were extinct), but the proportions were all over the place. Milly was also pretty sure no dinosaurs had opposable thumbs. It reminded Milly of the flame sprites.
She could deal with that later. First, she had to get Terra out of the literal line of fire.
Easier said than done considering the cone of fire that was coming down around her. Milly was confident the gear would keep her safe for a little bit, but since her glove still hadn’t cooled off from touching the doorframe, she probably only had one shot at moving Terra before the gear would be too hot to use.
Milly paced a broad circle around Terra until she’d lined her up with the only big piece of cover around: the corner of the rooftop access building. “Well, here goes nothing.” Milly dashed forward into the flame cone, she paused just long enough to wrap her arms around Terra then heaved with all her might!
Terra didn’t move an inch. It was as though she was nailed to the floor.
Milly grunted, she could feel the heat build up all around her by the Milly-second. She went from cozy warm, to scorching day, to accidentally closing the cold water knob before the hot water knob in the shower. It already hurt, and it was rapidly getting worse. “Hng! Come on!”
With a sudden jolt, Terra came loose.
“Yes!” Milly rushed out of the fire with Terra then ran past the rooftop access building and grabbed a corner to sling them both around the wall, out of sight of the T-Rex and the blazing fire. Milly hoped it would be good enough, even though she knew it was still hot here, it had to be better.
It would have to do, because Terra was too hot to handle any longer. Just because she was out of the oven didn’t mean she magically cooled off. “Gah!” Milly pulled away from her and took a step back to reconsider her next move then froze stiff.
Terra’s legs were missing! She just floated in mid-air, like everything else that Milly didn’t set down properly.
“Oh, no.” Milly’s own legs turned to jelly as she sank to the floor, horrified for all of two seconds until she noticed the strangest thing from her low angle. The jagged edges below Terra’s knees were just as sandy as her skin, all the way through. No blood, no bones, nothing.
Milly blinked, confused. “Is… is this even Terra?”
It had to be. Hypothetically, even if Terra could make a sand clone as a decoy, why would a decoy be able to improvise a shield from a solar panel? Besides, did Terra keep a spare uniform around just for that? Maybe the Terra that Milly knew had been a sand clone all along?
Before Milly could tumble herself any deeper down that rabbit hole, she got up and inspected Terra up-close. The uniform was badly burned, but one detail caught her attention. A scorched hitchhiker seed clung to the inside collar of what was left of her jacket. Milly remembered that she’d picked a bunch of those out of their clothes this morning. Even if that felt like forever ago, it had been the first good deed she’d done with her power.
Terra’s face certainly looked the same, though she was scowling harder than usual and molten glass covered half her sandy face. Peeking through, Milly found she could barely see through the glowing glass, but went much deeper than she’d have expected. She only saw more sand on the other end. That made a certain kind of sense.
“So, Terra is made entirely of sand. Sure, why not.” Milly threw up her hands. “I guess that explains a few things. Like why she’s up here soloing a T-Rex when the smoke alone would kill a person, never mind the heat.”
Although, the heat had clearly overwhelmed Terra; a quarter of her was glassed. Milly wondered how bad that was for her. It probably still wasn’t great, but Milly felt relieved to know that all that molten glass wasn’t actually burning her skin.
“Okay, I reckon you’ll be alright for now.” Milly stepped away from Terra. She rounded the corner of the roof building and pointed at the T-Rex. “As for you. I just thought of a brief experiment I’d like to conduct. If I’m wrong, uhm, sorry.”
With that, Milly circled around to the T-Rex’s tail. A quick poke proved it was hard and solid.
“Okay, so…” Milly gave the tail an experimental kick. It felt like hitting a tree trunk. “Oof. Hang on one second. Don’t go anywhere.”
Milly snickered while she wandered off back into the stairwell. She only had access to the top two floors, since a pair of flame sprites were heating the stairs that went further down. Still, that was enough to find what she was looking for.
Milly strutted up to the T-rex again, this time holding a fire axe. “Let’s give this another try then,” she said before she lined up as though she were chopping firewood on the block. She could practically hear her dad nagging at her to stand properly. Feet apart, both hands on the shaft, a little practice tap.
She swung the axe at the tail tip.
The axe dug into the tail and swung clean through as though it were thick mud. Milly felt the impact and growing resistance, but the next moment she was already through. The axe buried itself into the roof right between Milly’s feet.
“Yikes!” Milly jumped back. “O-okay. Right. Three things that can hurt me so far: Gravity, Fire, and my own stupidity.”
Maybe those wood chopping lessons weren’t the worst thing after all. She still felt it had been an awfully unfair deal to double her allowance in exchange for doubling the stockpile, though. Double zero was still zero. Dad had called that a lesson too.
As expected, the ‘wound’ on the dinosaur had the same consistency as the flame sprites. Some kind of solid fire rather than any kind of normal innards. “Ahah! I knew it. It’s just as fake as those flame sprites! Uhm, in the sense that they are both constructs rather than people or animals.”
Milly briefly considered if that made Terra not a person either. “...I’m gonna follow duck rules on this one. If it looks like a person, swims like a person, and quacks like a person, then it probably is a person."
“Anyway.” Milly said while she stepped up and yanked the axe out of the roof. The dinosaur remained blissfully unaware of her presence. Its dull eyes were still focused on the empty spot it was currently incinerating.
Milly looked up at the T-rex and grinned while she spun the axe around in her hand.
“Timber.”
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“Huh, that was easy.” Milly rested the axe on her shoulder while she surveyed her work. A dozen flaming chunks of neatly diced dinosaur floated in midair. She’d have cut them smaller, but each cut let out more and more heat; even her Texan hide was tanning more than she'd like. “T-Rex? More like T-Recked! Heh. I gotta start writing these down.”
Granted, some scalding hot chunks of dinosaur on the roof probably would not make it any easier to get the fire under control, but it had to be better than active tyrannical opposition that could set nearby buildings on fire.
While Milly was glad to have done something useful, she also felt a little let down. A rooftop battle with a ‘dragon’ wasn’t nearly as exciting as it should have been. If anything, Terra’s experience was closer to it.
“Not a whole lot is gonna stand up to a supersonic axe-blade, I reckon.” Milly shrugged.
Meanwhile, Terra had taken notice of her sudden change in surroundings. All that meant was that she looked slightly more confused than annoyed. On the bright side, nothing about her expression suggested she was in pain from losing her legs.
“What to do with you, Terra?” Milly mused while she leaned on the axe handle. “I can’t take you with me. I can’t climb with you and you’re too hot to touch for long and my gloves are at their limit. I can’t just leave you on Abigail’s hand either. You’d burn everyone else on there.”
Terra obviously didn’t respond.
“Right. I’ll go tell your sister.” Milly set the axe down next to Terra. “If that dinosaur gives you any trouble, just whack him with this, k? See you in a bit.”