"Shouldn't we be getting closer? They're about to enter the crater."

One of the reporters finally gave voice to what several of them had been thinking since the conclusion of the 'Battle of Devon Island'. Yes, that was what one enterprising young journalist had coined the short-lived fight the kids had just won and from how the term was being bandied about it was highly likely that's what would be written in the papers.

Over the course of the past hour the press teams had been steadily splitting into two camps. The first were those willing to listen to my advice, respect the limits of the defensive force-field, let the soldiers do their jobs even if they had to abandon the best camera spots for security reasons and generally behave as reasonable adults with a developed level of caution and a healthy respect towards things that could reduce them to chunky salsa in a fraction of a second.

Then there was the other camp; those always pushing boundaries to get the best story for themselves and their networks, those that were willing to take risks or ignore help freely given in favor of what they thought was best, those loudly making demands in the name of the 'freedom of the press' or other such tripe and generally making a nuisance of themselves. In short, they were only stopped from being zombie fodder by the shield and my presence and did not even realize. This second group mostly consisted of the younger journalists in the group, but not entirely. The two that had seen what had happened to the super-hating pilot were firmly in the 'common sense' side of the equation, which proved that occasionally my Old Man was right no matter how much I hated most of what he stood for.

Ignoring the sharp stab of a brewing migraine, I walked towards where Marie Colvin and another older journalist were taking time to drink, eat a sandwich and smoke. The old war correspondent had limited herself to cigarettes but her companion had brought out a pipe and some tobacco leaf. Not the cheap ones either.

"Those will kill you," I told them in lieu of a greeting.

"Young lady, when you get to be my age you'll realize that quite a few things all people do will kill us, growing old first among them," the old man responded with a half-patronizing, half-fond smirk. "Human survival is a miracle with an expiration date and ours is coming up soon, I'm afraid."

"I wouldn't know, I stopped ageing half a year ago," I retorted, took a seat on thin air and stretched. They both stared at the casually dropped bombshell but had too much self-control to gape as less experienced people would have. "I'm also experiencing time a couple dozen times faster than you are now, a ratio that is slowly growing along with my powers. While I'm chronologically merely eighteen, biologically I'm in my early twenties while mentally I'm thirty-two. By this time next year who knows?" I threw my hands in the air. "Maybe I'll have lived longer than either of you. This is the Age of Wonders; nothing is set in stone."

"So you reckon you'll live forever?" Madam Colvin asked with the air of someone humoring a younger, more naive associate.

"Nah, I'll probably go down swinging," I answered without hesitation. It was something I had chosen by taking up the mantle of a hero because who knew when an enemy greater than I could handle would turn up. "So also shall I lie low when I am dead. But now let me win glorious renown," I quoted.

"Homer's Illiad?" the older gentleman's bushy eyebrows tried to disappear into his receding hairline. "Color me pleasantly surprised."

"That makes two of us," the old war correspondent whispered, nodding to herself. "This whole no ageing thing, how did it happen?"

"Powers push you towards your ideal self and nobody's ideal self is a corpse," I told them, then glanced towards the kids in the distance. They were finally going over the rim after their own brief rest; that was going to light a fire under the dumb group's collective asses pretty soon.

"Wait, I remember this," the old man said. I wanted to stop calling him 'old man' but he hadn't volunteered his name and he must have his reasons. Maybe I should have read more of that paperwork General Rinaker had handed over... nah. "It was in that interview you did for Oprah. About why all supers were pretty?"

"Don't remind me, that thing was a shitshow," and it was. It really, really was. "Too much social justice crap about unrealistic role models when being better than human is the whole point of superpowers. Besides, supers aren't pretty because we want to be role models." And if people thought about it very few would really want to be Superman; their family and world dead, they being refugees to a world that often turned against them and having to risk their lives every so often. Being me wouldn't be as bad, mostly because I had worked hard to keep the Earth from getting blown up. "We are pretty because deep down we're vain, some of us more than others. But hey, if given the opportunity to be a better version of themselves wouldn't everyone choose to be pretty?"

Before we could continue that very interesting conversation, we were interrupted by a commotion near the defense perimeter. People were shouting at both the soldiers and each other, banging against the forcefield with sticks, rocks and their own bare arms and generally making a scene. I sighed, took another look at the kids to confirm they were fine - for certain definitions of the word - then got up to deal with whatever new malarkey the brainless half of the equation had come up with.

There were several reasons I'd never taken up any baby sitting jobs as a high school student and this whole mission was reminding me of every one of them.

xxxx

"Ow! Fuck you, stupid slime, and the alien space magic you rode to Earth on!"

Cindy was not having a good day. Yeah, there had been plenty of opportunities to needle Mark. Plenty of monsters to kill and chances to be awesome, too. But why did everything have to be so ugly? First, there was this whole wasteland of an island they were on. Barren, broken rock as far as the eye could see with no trees or other plants - alien ones aside, no animals, no people or buildings, not even mountains or hills. Just a big, empty, ugly nothing. Then it was the freezing temperature. It had to be minus thirty out there and even without wind that had become painfully cold very quickly, especially with the sun dimmed to almost nothing. She had not noticed at first because Boss Blondie had done something to warm the air near her - the better to keep the civilians from dying, probably. But the moment they'd been left to 'guard the landing site' everything had gone South or, considering where they were, North. She knew it wouldn't kill her but it felt unpleasant enough she almost wished she'd worn more than a pink catsuit.

The monsters were ugly, too. The plant zombies had splashed grey-green goo everywhere each time they were cut or blasted, somehow combining the worst of both plants and zombies. Cleaning up had been as easy as letting the affected instances fade then recreating them, but that didn't do anything about the visuals - visuals Cindy was forced to see from literally thousands of slightly varied perspectives.

Now even the environment was against them, or was that another monster? The three of them had been following power cables and pipes extending from the research station into the crater on the thought that whatever the CIA had been doing here they'd still need water from the condensers and power from the solar panels, neither of which would work too well inside the crater itself. That line of thinking had led their little group several miles down an uneven slope of mostly mundane, bare rock with occasional patches of this sticky green jelly whose appearances increased in frequency the deeper they ventured into the thickening mist. The patches were sizzling all around them and the teenage brunette suspected they were producing whatever gases the mist was made up of. Worst of all, once they reached deep enough into the crater, everything was covered in the green slime... and the moment they'd started walking on top of it it had started spewing caustic gas.

"Ugh, it's like cutting up onions all over again," Gabby agreed with her, rubbing his eyes in a futile attempt to get rid of the stinging. "You think it's dangerous?"

"Doubt it," Mark said, having joined them on the ground for once. "Oh, I suppose normal people would have died and turned into those things we fought earlier but our bodies are much tougher than that. For us it's not even as bad as tear gas."

"Speak for yourself Soldier Boy, I'm dying here." And the worst part was her usual trick of shifting between instances was not helping at all here. "We've been breathing this shit for some time. How do we know it doesn't add up?"

"If you're so worried why didn't you turn back the moment we encountered the first slime patch?" Mark demanded.

"And have to explain why the two of you got lost? You guys can't see straight in this crap, remember?" That and if the two of them went in she didn't want to be the one to chicken out.

"We wouldn't have gotten lost, we could have followed the-"

"Guys, I think I'm hearing footsteps," Gabby interrupted them, making his three magic swords grow bigger. "Or rather squelching, like our boots are causing with every step into this green crap."

The three of them went back to back to better cover all possible approaches. Visibility was so limited even Cindy, who could best see through the concealing magic, could only see vague shapes beyond a hundred feet or so. Mark had it so bad he could not risk flying or he might never find their group again. The enemies shambling out of the mists seemed to have no such problem.

They were huge, bloated things half again as tall as a man and three times as wide. Muscles had haphazardly grown over their limbs and torso to such proportions they made even the most grotesquely hyperthyroid body builder seem lanky in comparison. Their skin was split in many places but instead of blood or the green-grey goo the earlier plant zombies had had, a sickly yellow light was pouring out of the cracks. Their heads were misshapen lumps of flesh with six eyes in all the wrong places, none the same size as another. Their single mouth was a gaping hole with no teeth, a too-loud death rattle coming out of it with each of their bodies lumbering, squelching steps.

"Bogies! Six of them," Mark called out, hovering only a few feet above the ground.

"Pretty sure we both noticed them before you did," Cindy couldn't help but retort despite the obvious threat bearing down on them. Needling the boys was just fun.

"I'm going for it," Gabby said, throwing a torrent of dancing blades at the nearest enemy. Near a dozen of his magic swords flew like arrows... only to bounce off the monsters' hide. "Guys, they're tough!"

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"We can see that," the brunette muttered under her breath, sending her army of copies to stab the pair stomping their way to her with her borrowed magical blade. Her copied weapon stabbed into the two monsters too many times to count but despite Cindy's considerable strength and whatever magic it had it only caused scrapes and cuts less than an inch deep. There were enough of them to turn her targets into pincushions but the monsters hardly seemed to care. They pressed through the range of her power, trying to wade through her countless instances but coming up short. They might be larger and stronger than her, but there were far more of her than them.

Mark blasted one of the walking dead brutes with that terribly intense beam of his, burning a hole into its torso. A very shallow hole that though it grew deeper the more he held the beam at the same spot it was questionable if he'd manage to kill one before it reached their position. Gabby was having similar problems, his swords only superficially cutting into their foes. That he was also splitting his attacks on both of the monsters coming for him did not help. They needed to use heavier attacks, but before she could shout that out to the boys, the monsters attacked - and not in the way she'd been expecting.

The closest of the brutes... flashed for lack of better words. Each one of the glowing cracks along its body became brighter than the sun for a split-second, spilling that sickly yellow light all over the place. It was blindingly bright, and not in the way a lightning bolt was. Cindy cried out as she felt like red hot pokers had been stabbed into her eyes. Not just her but all of her did, her instances similarly affected. Her eyes shut involuntarily and her instances collapsed reflexively before she could feel the same pain reflected in all of them.

She shook her head, stumbled, tried to blink the afterimages burned into her retinas. The disorientation receded and she tried to take stock of the situation, then the second monster flashed like the first. More pain stabbed into her eyes, sending her reeling. The dizziness increased and a high-pitched whine was all she could hear despite the flashes producing no sound themselves. The waves of warmth she felt on her back told her that her teammates were on the receiving end of similar attacks.

She spread a new wave of instances to scout but didn't open her eyes herself. Either the enemy was ready for them or those flashes were automatic because they kept coming. Many of her already disoriented instances failed, catching the blasts full-on. Others managed to avert their eyes but now that the pair of brutes were among them the waves of twisted magic radiating off them at every blast could add to their shock and lack of balance whether they saw them or not. Cindy tasted bile. When had she fallen on her back and why did she feel like shit? Oh, it was the bad guys' fault. Each time they used that unfair area stunner, it felt like a blow to the head and a kick to the gut in one big awful package.

Enormous arms picked her up with great strength, but the bad guys had finally made a mistake. Up close and personal she didn't need to open her eyes to know where the enemy holding her was and she still had that magic knife. She shuddered as a blast washed over her point-blank but the moment the monster had used it she burst into an army's worth of instances. Four seconds; that's how long it took for the pair to throw another blast, she'd kept count. In the first of those seconds the magic knife stabbed half a dozen times in each and every spot Cindy could reach. The monster's arms slacked, most of those huge muscles reduced to hamburger. Second number two she broke its grip but instead of fleeing she blindly charged, reaching and stabbing even more of the enemy. The brute collapsed and she managed to reach its head. Then it was slice after slice after slice into its neck until it severed the monster's spine.

A powerful wave of pure euphoria coursed up the arm she'd decapitated her foe with then burst throughout her body. Pain and dizziness subsided just a little and she felt an urge to burst into instances, as many of them as she could for the hell of it. The elation was short-lived. Something huge grabbed her leg and pulled her bodily off the ground only to slam her around and back down with tremendous force. Rocks were pulverized, the layer of slime was thrown back and splattered everywhere by the impact. Cindy gasped, winced, and involuntarily opened her eyes, only to receive a stun-blast to the face by the second brute.

Huge hands gripped her arms and lifted her up, then pulled in opposite directions. She kicked out, connecting with its massive torso, then redoubled her efforts by splitting the possibilities and delivering as many potential kicks as she could Another blast caught her point-blank. Closed eyes or not, it still felt like a kick to the gut by a giant. Her instances winked out but she recreated them and repeated her attack. She got the very satisfying sound of monstrous ribs shattering under her barrage but the monster did not fall. Another point-blank blast and her stomach felt as if a giant's fist was squeezing it into a pretzel. If she got out of this, she soo was going to improve her durability any way she could. She made as many instances as she could handle and kept kicking; the only way out was through...

xxxx

Mark felt his jaw cracking as a rock shot him out of the sky. A damn rock! Why hadn't he thought the monsters could do that? Had the enemy not proven they were using advanced tactics and combinations of powers rather than the swarm tactics mindless zombies should have been limited to? Hindsight was even more of a bitch than Cindy.

The area stunners had caught all of them by surprise, especially with that enemy heavy infantry not having any apparent weapons but their size and obvious strength. One moment they thought they had the range advantage, the next they were being overwhelmed by a shock and awe attack. With a proper area stunner too; if it worked on supers like themselves, it had to be much more powerful than a simple flashbang. Modern combat forces had been looking for something like this for nearly a century and the magical, technologically-backwards aliens had it. Because of course they did; nothing could ever be easy, or make sense.

He fired his beam at the big bastard with a foot-deep hole in his - its? - torso. Something like that should have killed any reasonable enemy but of course, they were fighting zombies now, weren't they? The black boy aimed for the thing's knee; if center-of-mass did not work he'd settle for crippling its mobility before he went for a head shot.

The brute stumbled as he kept the beam on target, burning through long-dead flesh. Did it count as dead if it walked and fought, and roared like a beast? At least it did not talk and the damage made the second rock it threw miss. That didn't help at all with the rock the second brute threw, but Mark was ready this time; he dodged with time to spare. The pair advanced on him, flashing their stunner in tandem. Twin stabs of pain went through his brain and the nausea nearly made him puke, but the effect was less than it would have been up close. He wanted to open the distance further and escape it altogether but he couldn't; if he went too far he wouldn't be able to see anything in the fog and if he no longer held the pair's attention they'd go after his teammates. He needed something to finish them quickly.

Thinking hard and trying to remember the layout of the battlefield hidden beneath the enemy's obfuscation, he dropped both the laser and the industrial plasma cutter. One slot he then filled with the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, his old standby for close-in attacks. The second... the second he filled with the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast. The so-called Mother Of All Bombs could strike with the force of eleven tons of TNT, enough explosive power to flatten a reinforced building or cut a battleship in half. He doubted those two bastards could stand up to such explosions but just in case...

Using the maneuverability of Gravity Company's latest flight suit, he moved himself so he was between the pair and the rest of the team. He was just high enough for the stun blasts to still hurt but not threaten to disable him, but still low enough to see his two teammates still fighting. It was not going well. Gritting his teeth, Mark combined the MOAB with the A-10 Thunderbolt's rotary cannon. He wanted to turn that pair into confetti so that he could go back and help Gabby before his opponents overwhelmed him. He breathed in, breathed out, then took careful aim. Better to do this properly the first time.

The last thing he expected was one of the monsters to cross the hundred feet of distance that separated them in one titanic leap the moment he pulled the mental trigger for his attack.

xxxx

"You can't keep us here!" one of the idiot reporters shouted. "We have rights! This is false imprisonment!"

"The barrier is for your own protection!" I shot back, rapidly approaching the end of my patience. "Do you really want to get out there and get killed by suddenly appearing enemies?"

"There are no more enemies, the other supers beat them all," another idiot shouted. "There's no way that small a station had more people than the hundreds we saw. Even if stragglers still exist I'm sure you could handle them while escorting us there." That, of course, conveniently ignored the fact that monsters could multiply if provided the right environment and sufficient violence, or more could be summoned if a powerful dark mage was present. I was about to point that out before someone managed to come up with an even stupider idea, somehow.

"Aren't those three supers just teenagers? Does the US government advocate child endangerment now?" That particularly egregious example of human stupidity managed to sound smug about his asinine accusation. "We have laws about such things, you know!"

"It's not just child endangerment, it's child labor and child soldiers too!" someone else added, jumping on the bandwagon of seeing everything the government did as stupid and evil, missing the slight tremors that had some pebbles vibrating right outside the shield. They probably thought that if some so-called social justice warriors shouted loudly enough all the world's problems would be fixed - or at least they would have a good story to write about that would get them a fat paycheck.

I so... didn't have time for this. A look at the kids showed that they were being approached by tougher enemies now, because the larger and uglier zombies got the more powerful they tended to be and those looked bigger and uglier than anything I'd faced other than my Old Man or the Big Bad himself. For a few heartbeats, I thought about dropping the shield and letting them out. If they'd started this stupid protest of theirs a few minutes earlier I even might have, but now... now they were about to be given a lesson they would not soon forget. The ground shook a bit more.

"Are you retarded?" I asked the initial instigator, a thirty-something, somewhat-muscular guy from some network I'd never heard of before. "Or do you not understand the difference between your cozy city life and a war zone out here in a wilderness full of man-eating monsters? Are you even a proper journalist or some media influencer that bought a place on the plane by relying on fame, because real journalists have a brain and use it."

"Bitch you did not just say that to me." Yeah, he was some sort of weirdo here to push an agenda. Fortunately, our locally-sourced teacher was about to arrive. A glance at the kids showed them fighting hard. I should be out there, helping them through the hardest obstacles, but that would defeat the whole purpose of this excursion. They were clever, strong, resourceful enough and needed to grow up. And if they failed, they had the rings too.

The ground just outside the shield exploded. Pro tip; when making a defensive barrier, always make them a full sphere if you can, covering underground approaches too. If the dumbass showing off his stupidity on record was waiting for my reply he would have to settle for a live demonstration because a green-grey tentacle as thick as I was tall burst out of the earth and stretched towards the sky. Then it stretched some more, and more, and more, until it rose to the height of nearly six hundred feet.

A localized earthquake shook everything for a couple of miles as more tentacles sprouted out of the plateau like weeds, dragging behind them a bulbous, disgustingly slimy mass the size of a residential building; a large one. While the giant monster bore some resemblance to much, much smaller alien plant specimens I'd seen during the invasion it was certainly uglier and its ability to burrow and relocate under the earth increased its threat level even more than its enormous size did. It was basically a kaiju that could ignore any above-ground defenses, most long-range detection as long as it burrowed deeply enough, as well as early interception by the majority of heroes. In short, it was a weapon of mass destruction custom-built to counter most current opposition.

I wondered if it shared a common designer with the other two reported kaiju, the attackers on the General's earlier bases, or the attack against me in New York. If so, these showed an alarming trend of both qualitative and quantitative improvement between the monsters, as if their designer was both ironing out kinks in the process and using data from prior battles to develop new designs. Then I decided the answer did not matter in the current situation. I had to fight this thing either way because the shield hadn't been built to handle attacks from enemies of that power for long and the safety of the reporters had been entrusted to me... no matter how badly some of them wished it hadn't.

At least the overtly aggressive guy that had instigated the protest against me had just pissed himself...