Before our arrival, the bindings on the prisoner had been breaking. Before our arrival, Mandy seemed to have an idea on what was going on and had told me to remain hidden. Even as the mountaintop shattered and massive amounts of earth buried the cave and all within it, I could have chosen to act, reach out with my powers and try to stop the collapse or, more likely, shield the cave itself from them. But that would have meant dropping out of intangibility or creating force-fields, neither of which would be conductive to stealth. In the end, I pushed my worries aside and chose to trust in Mandy and Jerry to know what they were doing and focused on what we currently lacked; information.

Most city-dwelling folk don't quite grasp how large mountains are. Humans have an odd relationship with large numbers and scales above our own, with a tendency to eyeball things and render them down to a human-centric worldview. Us being tiny little dust motes in the grand scheme of things, that worldview is skewed towards the sizes, distances, speeds and numbers we can easily handle. I had known this was a thing before getting powers, but only really understood it once my own capabilities increased and my own view was forcibly expanded further through superhuman senses. Only then could I instinctively grasp how much bigger and more powerful a tank was than a person, a ship from a tank, a large skyscraper from a ship, a city from a skyscraper.

This was relevant to the peak of the mountain collapsing in the implications of its size. It wasn't even a large part of the mountain itself, a mere quarter of a cubic mile. For someone that could flatten a battleship with a punch or manhandle a skyscraper, it wasn't particularly impressive, right? Yeah, no. It was a mass of three billion tons suddenly knocked downwards at the speed of a runaway train. For comparison purposes, that was four times larger mass-wise than New York City. As in, every building, every street and sidewalk, every tunnel and sewer and foundation, every vehicle and every person within the largest city in the United States some titanic force had kicked down, hard, four times over. It was something that would take a nuclear bomb to do and it'd have to be one of the larger ones, point-blank. I could also have done it, had I applied my powers in their most destructive, least controlled forms. But it was not something the vast majority of supers, or even groups of supers could do - which was a good thing. It meant that supervillains could not flatten cities when they felt like. That had been a state of affairs I - and most sane, reasonable people - had hoped would last for a bit longer, but had known would not persist forever ever since the invasion.

I slipped through the layers of still-shifting rocks and soil, superhuman senses scanning my surroundings for the origins of the attack. Someone had not only pushed the world a dangerous step closer to a superpowered war but had given killing my best friends the good old college try. This was not acceptable, and I was feeling eager to explain to the unknown assailants the error of their ways with extreme prejudice. Except my senses didn't pick up anything; as far as I could tell the mountain hadn't been kicked down by an outside force any more than the bindings on the prisoner had been removed by someone other than the still unconscious and securely bound guy. Which was obviously bullshit and quite reminiscent of Anne's perception-diverting powers, so I made sure my mental defenses were as solid as could be and looked again.

Sound was mostly useless. The mountain's collapse was not only incredibly loud, its sounds came from literally billions of individual moving sources that had spread over several square miles and were still going. It was a lot harder than hearing a single human speak across an entire city because first, human speech followed patterns all of us were familiar with and second, because when you could also see the human you were looking for you knew where the sounds would be coming from. Here I had neither and thus had not only to defeat whatever concealment effect the bad guys were using but find where to look for it with nothing to go on.

Vision was better. Humans and most of their works were highly visible in the wilderness. There was zero chance to mix most anything artificial with the nature around us and assuming the source of the attack was within normal super combat ranges of up to six miles, that left only nine hundred cubic miles to check for visual discrepancies of someone using a concealment power without perfectly accounting for all the countless minor details they affected in their surroundings. It should only take a few minutes - or less than one under Forced Acceleration speeding everything up for me. Except when you're in a fight seconds matter and if that was true for unpowered humans, it was even more so for supers that could move, think and act a lot faster. The enemy's next move came before I could uncover them.

One moment the sky above was mostly clear, only the cloud of dust naturally rising from the mountain's collapse marring it, the next a blood-red translucent film started spreading across it. Despite being able to see the difference in the illumination, the sunlight warping and shifting in wavelength as it passed through the boundary of the rapidly forming dome around the mountain, my senses could not perceive the dome itself. It didn't have mass to curve space-time with its existence, it wasn't held together by complex networks of electromagnetic interactions, it wasn't made up of particles given shape by nuclear forces. The only reasons I could tell it was there was its warping effect on the light it passed through, and its volume obstructing the passage of dust motes but, notably, not air molecules. In a way it was very similar to my own force-fields in that they were not made of anything physical at all but could exert an effect on their surroundings. It was just the nature of the effect that differed; since it was not force, my senses could not pick it up directly.

But that gave me an idea and I ignored the usual sounds and sights the human mind prioritized to focus on the other information my senses brought in. Things like density, temperature, pressure, cohesion, electrical charges and molecular motion, all information that people knew about but did not have personal experience with because human senses could not pick them up. And with the thought that a competent bad guy would try to hide themselves at those levels too, I looked for discrepancies. Because like a color-blind woman trying to coordinate an outfit, you could still partially account for things you knew little about but the end result would be mediocre and obvious to experts. With a dozen times more different things to deal with than just color, it did not take me long to find the bad guys' mistakes; several hundred human shapes hanging in the air above the mountain but under the new red dome. They seemed to have the density and temperature of dust-filled air, but the minute variations were too uniform. They lacked the tiny build-up of static electricity from air friction and all the dust in the air. The cohesion of dust grains in those volumes matched pure quartz and not the random mixture of granite and marble dust, tiny basalt fibers and a dozen other types of possibly volcanic minerals in the rest of the dust cloud. Plus whatever masking power they were using didn't account for the randomness of Brownian motion properly.

Six out of ten, even my baby sister had thought of all of those things.

A pile of shattered rocks in the shortened mountain below us started to glow a bright orange-red before it turned into a puddle. Molten stone bubbled and hissed before exploding outwards as Jerry's spinning armored form flew out, Mandy held in a tight embrace. They performed a contest-perfect dancing pirouette in mid-air, globules of glowing boiling minerals thrown off by centrifugal forces as they rose, leaving behind pristine golden plating, gleaming red fabric and mildly flushed skin. Mandy was smiling like a prom queen on the dance floor, for what greater stage could be found for the pair than the crumbling mountain they had melted themselves out of in their dance? They were totally, stupidly in love with each other and it was so blatantly obvious you couldn't help but be inspired by what they'd found in each other despite horrible adversity - or at least wish them well.

The hidden villains proved their maliciousness by immediately taking advantage of the pair's distraction to shoot them in the back. Lines of the same reddish construct that had formed the dome linked the bad guys, all focused to a single point before lancing down in a single bolt with their combined power and the force of a meteor. It was, I realized, how they had brought down the mountain, half a thousand supers pooling their powers together into one grand combined effort. Jerry and Mandy did not even look up; they had eyes only for each other even as the bolt struck Mandy in the back. The red-dressed sorceress glowed for a moment, the staff orbiting the pair with opposite spin crackled ominously... and a crimson wave blasted out of my best friend and hammered the unseen supers against their own barrier dome.

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"You'll have to do better than that, Wizard!" Mandy laughed as the enemy's efforts at stealth were shredded by their own reflected assault, revealing five hundred Asian-looking men in red and black martial artist uniforms picking themselves up - or rather down - from their own dome. Five hundred of the Red Dragon's soldiers, more than even the most pessimistic Intelligence weenies predicted he had. But they were not alone. In the middle of their formation floated a tall, black-haired, black-robed, pale-skinned guy that looked more like a priest than anything else. A very disheveled-looking priest now, one that seemed pretty mad that his second assassination attempt had been thrown back at his face. "Honestly, an amateurish Five Hundred Pillars formation?" Mandy kept taunting. "I'm insulted that you thought such kiddie-league pseudo-mysticism would suffice. It's not even a century old!"

"We'll endeavor to be suitably impressive as we crush you and your toymaker," the man sneered, managing to make his narrow, angular face even uglier. "Or is it boy-toy these days?"

None of us were merely bantering. Mandy's magic was already swirling in a dizzying tornado of hundreds of individual effects, each no larger than a dime but as bright as plasma torches. Jerry was conjuring more material inside his armor and fusing it into existing components in ways that defied three-dimensional engineering, adapting his existing weapons and defenses to what he'd seen or guessed of the enemy. The Red Dragon's soldiers were flying into a different formation, their powers flaring as they did. The Wizard - probably the same guy Mandy was complaining about earlier - was moving his arms like a conductor, pointing at various points in the soldiers' formation in turn. That was somehow able to direct their flaring energies into constructs that linked them together in more and more complex shapes.

As for me? I was flying around invisible, inaudible and intangible, going through the soldiers one by one with no outward effect because for the moment the bad guys did not seem to know I was around and turnabout was fair play.

"That sounds like sour grapes to me, Wizard," Mandy added the exact moment Jerry's armor finished upgrading and his suit's weapons started charging with an ominous hum. "Just because you can't get willing attention from your preferred demographic without copious payment..."

The insult was cleverly calculated and, from the Wizard's enraged scowl, had found its mark. Perhaps everything since our arrival had been planned in the little time Mandy and Jerry had to work with since learning the prisoner was being freed. If so, I was more than happy to sit back and let said plan unfold while I worked in the background. It was a reversal of our usual roles and dynamic from the Invasion, and also a sign of how my friends had grown in my absence. Plus setting up a few proper surprises for the unwelcome foreigners took both time and effort. It would be a shame if their visit to the US went without a proper answer for their mountainous vandalism and assassination attempts.

"Shut up and die," the Wizard growled, his voice echoing like thunder. "Baited, spell-trapped and overwhelmed by mere novices is fitting for someone coasting on innate power instead of true study of the Arcane." Neat! I'd heard of bitter academic rivalries before, even ones where things turned violent or even murderous, but hadn't seen one up close.

The huge glowing glyph linking the soldiers together rained bolts of crimson magic, hundreds of them. With the benefits of superspeed and enhanced senses I could tell only one point of the formation was firing at a time, concentrating all of the enemy supers' powers for a tiny fraction of a second before shifting the firing point. The first few dozen bolts were caught and absorbed by Mandy like their initial attack had been, but soon the fire rate and rapidly changing angles were outpacing her ability to shift her focus. That was when her own spells flew out by themselves, each one intercepting and mutually annihilating with one of the bolts the Irish sorceress had failed to absorb. Casting more of the interceptor spells seemed to be far more easy than direct absorption too but like my own creation of force-fields it seemed to cost something to my friend. An insignificant amount of effort per individual spell perhaps, but hundreds every second pushed her immediately on the back foot and steadily ate through her pre-cast magic.

Jerry was not idle while this was happening. Not only was he firing at The Wizard with all of his suit's energy weapons but he was sending a veritable swarm of miniature, pencil-sized missiles at the Red Dragon's soldiers. Each of those missiles had a milligram of Protonium in its tiny warhead. Also known as antiprotonic hydrogen, it was a material whose atoms were made of one proton and one antiproton, equal and opposite amounts of matter and antimatter. The moment the missiles impacted and destroyed whatever method Jerry had devised to keep the Protonium in them relatively stable, the exotic material self-annihilated and each missile detonated with the force of two dozen tons of TNT concentrated into a point no larger than a thumbnail.

Unfortunately, the enemy had come prepared for just such kinds of attacks. The Wizard had wrapped himself in a sheath of darkness that protected him from both Jerry's energy fire and the occasional missile sent his way by the simple expedient of vanishing any particles more energetic than gas molecules that strayed into it. No matter how much power Jerry's artifice put behind its attacks, the Wizard's spell was vanishing the method of delivery as easily as Jerry conjured materials for more missiles or reactor fuel.

As for the Red Dragon's soldiers, with this "formation" business combining their powers, the layer of the construct over them was proving strong enough to handle Jerry's attacks. Maybe if Jerry had brought his giant death robot he could have overwhelmed them. Certainly if The Wizard was not coordinating all our enemies into one giant combination their individual abilities would not be up to the task. But as things stood, the bad guys were winning this exchange.

This kind of tactical and strategic application was a far cry from the near-mindless monsters we'd fought through most of the Invasion, or the somewhat coordinated but still not well thought out attacks by terrorist supers drunk on their own power. Their plan was good enough to deal with Mandy and Jerry so far, and I suspected the big red barrier around the mountain was meant to keep any interfering heroes out until Jerry's energy reserves ran out, Mandy was exhausted trying to hold back hundreds of supers, and my friends were overwhelmed and killed. It showed that the bad guys were not just getting smarter but that they could also adapt to the abduction of one of their own and come up with a viable plan and trap in under half an hour.

That kind of improvement deserved a reward and with the hundredth tiny but quite powerful surprise set up I prepared to give it to them. The key to their plan here was obviously The Wizard. He was also a despicable guy that put his considerable magical talent and intellect into performing mass human sacrifices and repeatedly getting away with it. He also knew I existed and would suspect I was around as he probably was the one to break my bindings on the prisoner. Maybe if I suddenly appeared out of thin air and punched him in the face with the force of a small nuke he'd trigger some clever contingency spell and once again get away with all the horrible things he had done and was still attempting to do. He looked like a shifty weasel, he was probably smarter than me, and he was using a form of magic I was not familiar with so being prepared for me was very possible.

So I did something I'd never done before, not even as a test, on the thought that if I didn't know I could do it The Wizard would not know to prepare against it. Also, that I had no need for a mass-murdering dark mage and neither did my friends, so I extended one fist through his chest and another through his head while still incorporeal. Then I turned my incorporeality off while activating the hundred surprises I'd generously spread around.

The Wizard's heart and brain simultaneously exploded, forcibly shoved out of the way of my materializing fists. It hurt like someone had just hit both my hands with a sledgehammer and left my suit's gloves, my skin and even a bit of muscle torn up, but I could handle that much while presumably the bad guy couldn't handle all his most critical bits getting redecorated.

Then the shockwave from a hundred explosions reached me, carrying with them bits of blood and gore. My powers could not directly be applied to the internals of living beings. It was something I'd yet to find how to do, or maybe my type of magic didn't work like that. But people have a lot of empty places in them and mashed up, half-digested food and stomach fluids weren't actually alive. Cue in a hundred coin-sized Force Adjustment fields left inside soldiers' stomachs, set to adjust the nuclear binding force by about an order of magnitude downwards. I do not care how tough your big formation defense might be; if a tiny atomic bomb goes off inside you and you are not immune to nukes you're getting wrecked.

That had just happened to a fifth of the enemy soldiers at the same time as a literal decapitation strike on their leadership. It would throw them into disarray, rob them of their biggest weapons, shock and awe them and have them either fleeing or reduced to easy pickings for my friends and I.

The Red Dragon's soldiers seemed to disagree, mobbing us en masse the very moment I became physical...