McGuire leveled his slingshot at Mod. “Come on, buddy. We haven’t sparred in a while.”
Mod barely heard him over the gunfire from the street. Bullets riddled the edge of the roof, scattering bits of concrete and dust.
Any other time, Mod would’ve shouted for his friend to get down—
But McGuire wasn’t himself.
Even louder than the machinegun fire was the overwhelming feeling of danger. Mod didn’t need TINA’s voice to tell him what had happened to Kairon and the others on the block, but that didn’t stop her from shouting in his comms.
“The Menagerie is here! You and Arsenal are the only sovereign.”
McGuire fired his slingshot. The world slowed down. Mod saw his friend’s eyes narrow. Watched the creases in his coat shift. Saw the tension in the slingshot band.
Mod was already diving forward, slipping under the shot’s trajectory before it was even fired.
He tackled McGuire’s legs, knocking the gadgeteer off his feet. They tumbled across the roof. McGuire reached in his coat for his brass knuckles. Mod was faster. One hand brushed nanites across McGuire’s face. His whip wrapped around McGuire’s arm and sent a disabling shock through the gadgeteer’s body.
“Sorry,” he muttered as McGuire collapsed onto the roof and nanites covered his face.
He knew first-hand that anyone semi-conscious could still be a tool to a psychic. Mod didn’t plan on leaving Kairon with any tools.
Mod stayed low on the roof as the world lurched around him. He didn’t have much of a stomach left, but it turned anyway. The reality warper, Invarius, lay on the roof, still struggling with the nanite mask. His power flared. He might not have been able to see, but he still knew that Mod was up there with him.
Mod snaked his whip around Invarius’s ankle and zapped him. The stomach-turning sensation stopped and the reality warper fell unconscious to the roof.
Two down.
An impact sounded below—a crunch of concrete and metal. The telltale sound of a wall coming down.
Arsenal shouted, “Mod, help!”
In another time, Mod would’ve accessed Arsenal’s video feeds, but now he drank in the raw information from Arsenal’s HUD and TINA’s positioning—he knew what was happening.
Lock was after Arsenal.
She raced across the street, detouring through abandoned buildings and garages. She hurtled through broken windows, dove through water-damaged walls—
All to stay out of reach of Lock.
Arsenal was fast. Lock was faster. Half bullet, half freight train. He ran on all fours—bone claws dug into the ground, helping him turn on a dime, and propelling him with the force of a wrecking ball. Arsenal twisted out of the way, narrowly avoiding a clawed hand. Her thinsuit was her savior. Lock’s devastating speed only worked in two planes. Arsenal’s suit let her maneuver like a fighter jet, twisting and banking out of the way without touching the ground.
To make matters worse, the other mind-controlled capes turned on her too. Fire, ice, and assorted energy blasts rained down from the surrounding roofs. And occasionally, a blue forcefield would block Arsenal’s path, forcing her to change direction.
Mod couldn’t get down to her—couldn’t even get off of the building—without getting riddled with bullets. Even if the heavy mech was already down, that many machineguns would shred him.
But he had another idea.
Mod stowed his pistol and pulled out his fusion rifle. The tip of the barrel flattened into a line. Ports on his arm opened, offering a direct connection to his fusion canister. Then Mod aimed the rifle down at his feet. Fired. Mod knew the blueprints, knew exactly where to aim to cut the supports.
Mod punched a hole through the roof.
Fell—
And kept firing.
Mod punched a hole through the next two floors. Tiles, pipes, and beams all fell with him. Between his weight and the weight of the rubble trailing him, he crashed through those floors—didn’t even slow.
Bullets followed. The biomechs were faster than he expected. Bullets whizzed over his head, tracing his plunge through the building. Few supers could process data and react as fast as Mod, so it was humbling to confront an entire squad that could do just that.
As Mod fell through the floors, he processed his options—none of them were ideal.
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An exploding fusion cell or a collapsed building would take out the entire squad of biomechs, but certainly would hurt McGuire, Invarius, and several other capes close by. He ruled those two out immediately. Arsenal also couldn’t help. It was up to him and TINA—
And any attack they used had to be decisive. Otherwise the network of biomechs and the Menagerie would adapt.
Before Mod hit the first floor, he practically emptied his utility belt. He popped smoke pellets, flares, sonic grenades, and a radio signal jammer. None of them alone would throw off the mechs’ sensors, but combined they could buy Mod additional fractions of a second.
That would be enough.
Light and sound erupted around Mod as he fell through the second floor. Some of the scattered distractions stayed on the second floor, drawing the eye of some of the biomechs.
Mod grit his teeth.
Two and a half seconds had passed since he started falling.
His HUD changed. The walls of the building became a see-through wireframe. At the same time, TINA wove in views from Gnosis security cameras around the block and overlaid biomech schematics. Mod saw the world in data, saw their weak points.
He saw everything.
Mod hit the floor, tucked, and rolled with his shield and rifle. Then he came up firing.
A plasma guillotine lanced out, the first shot cutting two smaller rec units in half and lopping the arms off of another sec unit. Fluids and oil sprayed through the air. Nerve impulses twisted his barrel forty-five degrees. The second shot cleaved through three more units.
It might’ve been TINA guiding his hands, but each shot cut through and disabled multiple mechs at once. Each time, the barrel readjusted, allowing him to slice through enemies with mathematical efficiency. Never stopping. Never pausing.
He circled around, using wreckage and disabled mechs as cover. His movements were more spider-like than human as he moved across the street. His limbs contorted to keep his body low while his whip moved on its own, pulling Mod across the ground or clutching scrap for cover.
Mod wasn’t completely unscathed throughout the violent exchange. Some biomechs reacted faster than others, whether through faster hardware or lucky positioning. The first shots felt like a drizzle of rain. Mod kept his shield in front of his face and angled it to cover his rifle as much as possible. Shots pinged off his shield, but some hit his legs. But between his outer nanite layer and his supersuit, he barely felt the dull thuds of impact.
Naturally, Mod and TINA prioritized the faster mechs. They didn’t get off more than a few shots before they were cut down.
Two seconds had passed since the firefight started.
The biomechs finally caught up. So did the mind-controlled capes.
Sprinkling of shots turned into a downpour. Blasts of energy whizzed down and exploded beside him. The other capes didn’t have the aim or reaction time that the mechs had, but fireballs didn’t have to be direct hits to do damage. Impacts rippled across Mod’s nanites, the deluge blowing away chunks of his ablative armor.
NANITES 345% CAPACITY
NANITES 330% CAPACITY
NANITES 310% CAPACITY
But Mod dished out exponentially more damage than he took. Fusion lances cut across the battlefield like a surgeon’s scalpel. Another blast cut three mechs from hip joints to internal servo cluster, and they fell to the ground in chunks. The next lance was already slicing before the previous mechs finished hitting the ground.
Three more seconds ticked by as plasma and shells flew like a hailstorm.
NANITES 265% CAPACITY
NANITES 225% CAPACITY
Mod’s shield disintegrated. So, he grabbed the top half of a sec unit, used it as a replacement shield. It lasted another second before a fireball blew the rest of it out of his hand. Mod should’ve been blind as the fire engulfed him, but the flames couldn’t hide data. He leapt out of the fire and blasted another mech.
Fifteen mechs down. Ten to go.
Thankfully, he’d stopped Invarius before he could bring over all the Summit and the Brotherhood’s forces.
A blue forcefield appeared in Mod’s vision, blocking biomechs in the rear. But the world was moving so slow that Mod could see the barrier forming. It appeared like a ripple in space, starting at the center and moving outward.
The barrel of Mod’s rifle twisted as he leapt to the side. With the newfound angle, he shot around the barrier, slicing through two more mechs.
Mod hurled two more smoke pellets in Athena’s direction. Again, he knew that it wouldn’t stop her completely. The Menagerie could see through all of its puppet’s eyes, just like Mod was using Gnosis cameras, but the other supers couldn’t move or react as fast as Mod could—
Otherwise, he would’ve been dead by now.
He just needed a few more milliseconds.
Mod sacrificed more nanites. Made clones and afterimages of himself. Some leapt to the side or into the air, others feinted in the wrong direction. Bullets riddled the nanite clones, blowing them apart like ashen statues. None of the clones lasted long, but the Menagerie had a hard enough time telling them all apart.
It was enough to buy milliseconds and to fool Athena. She changed the angle of her last forcefield enough for the real Mod to fire around it. Mod split the last two sec units in half. They teetered and fell to the ground.
The street was a junkyard, littered in parts and grotesque fluids. Several mechs were still trying to claw their way across the ground or turn their barrels toward Mod. Others lay spasming.
Twenty-five down.
Another three seconds had passed, and Mod paused one second longer to take stock of his systems and collect as many nanites as he could. He’d lost a lot of nanites. Some were completely fried and others had been blown too far away to collect quickly.
Mod glanced up at the rooftops and met the eyes of a dozen mind-controlled capes. The eyes of the Menagerie. For half a second, no one moved. It felt like the Menagerie was sizing him up since its first plan had failed.
TINA read his mind and highlighted the psychic for him.
A crunch echoed across the block. Arsenal rocketed through the wall, taking chunks of plaster with her. Lock crashed through a moment later, taking the rest of the wall with him.
NANITES 185% CAPACITY
It would have to do.
Mod shouted, “Arsenal, over here!”
She didn’t need to be told again. Arsenal had been a blur—now she grew large in Mod’s vision. Lock was right behind her.
Mod leveled his rifle at his former roommate.
~ ~ ~