With the failure of the destruction of the blanket fort, we continue into the supermarket. Eerie silence is broken by some very loud slurping.

"Do you really have to do that right now?" Sophia glares at Thomas. He puts a finger up, and loudly sips from his mug over the course of 10 seconds.

He stops drinking. "Yes." He puts the mug back up to his face and begins slurping again. Midas, Sophia, and I share a glance; we nod in unison.

Sophia ties up Thomas in her threads. I run forward, grab his mug, and chuck it into the air. Midas pulls out his golden gun and shoots it into pieces. A light-brown liquid splashes onto the ground.

"My mug! That was my fourth favorite mug!" Thomas squirms, but the effort is futile. His wife had hung him upside down, and he was captured. "Hrnng! Argh! Let me out so I can throttle you!"

Midas blows some smoke away from the barrel. "How about no? I'm not into that anyway." He twirls the gun and puts it in the holster in his suit jacket. I feel like these actions are unnecessary.

Thomas stares in utter confusion at Midas. "We both know that isn't what I meant, and you know it."

Midas retorts, "Yeah, but who is in bindings right now? Bindings, may I add, that we both know you can easily tear apart." Is Thomas into BDSM? I'm kinda serious. This is an important question.

Thomas remains silent as his nanobots flood out of his body and cover the threads. When the mercury sinks back in, the rope is gone. Disintegrated. Consumed. Another word that means that the rope isn't here. He gracefully pushes off of nothing and flips onto the floor, finishing with a bow.

"Enough with the theatrics!" Rose barks. "Let's move on already. I think we're almost at the deli section."

Rose was right. We arrive at the deli to find it ransacked. Oh, and overrun with Nazis. 20 of them are standing guard while another 50 run back and forth like ants, carrying supplies.

We hide behind the shelves and peek over. Another important part of this image would be the man standing on two crates shouting orders. How do I describe him? Uh…bland. He looks like the average guy you could pull off the street. Well, a New York street anyway. Shaggy jeans, a wife beater undershirt, and shoes caked in mud. His ruffled, brown hair sprinkles dandruff with each movement.

"That, ladies and gentlemen, is Hector," Thomas announces in a whisper.

————————————————————————————————————

We huddle up back near the checkout. Midas make a very specific point to not loot through the registers, not because of morals, but because there's nothing of value in them…apparently.

While the others work up a plan, I excuse myself to go to the restroom. I don't need to use it per se, but I just need to get away from the others for a bit.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

I expected the restrooms to be in pretty bad shape, mainly due to them being public and in New York, but this is ridiculous. The blood stains all over the wall that probably came from the impaled Nazis is just bad. It doesn't at all match with the plant theme they have of spiky vines crawling up and down the walls and floor.

Though I do have to say, having a vine go straight through the arm socket, through the chest, and out the other arm socket would probably feel unpleasant.

…Alright, I probably shouldn't joke about this. So it seems that someone used plants to attack the Nazis, or the plants are alive. Either way, something caused this damage.

I sidestep the impaled Nazi and step over another, and I make my way to the only stall that isn't destroyed. Actually, this stall is held together by plants.

I slowly push open the door…

And jump back to avoid the vine whips. A brief look inside reveals a glaring girl. She looks to be in her teens, maybe high school, and the vines growing as twin-tails out of her skull does give me a hint as to who is controlling these vines.

She's a Dryad. I guess both of my hypothesizes were correct. She looks to be wearing a school uniform. Were there any schools nearby that still used uniforms? Hmm, I'm not sure.

She stops her attempts at stabbing, but the vines continue waving around menacingly. "Who are you?" She spits out. Her faint, lime-green lips shift into a snarl.

"A hero, well…disciple, but a hero nonetheless!" I shout as the vine whips at me. Spines imbed themselves in the drywall.

"How do I know you aren't lying?! What's your name?! A hero has a name!" She's growing more frantic in her movements. How long has this girl been in here?

"Uh," I jump over the rope. "I'm Silvernight!" I duck under another. Why does this feel like double-dutch.

"Never heard of you!" …Yeah. I'm a disciple and new and…I can't think of a third thing, but the two should be good.

"Of course you haven't! I'm new!" I give up on conversing with this girl and make a mad dash for the door. The second I'm outside, the door is boarded up with vines.

I meet back up with the others, whom seem to have finished their planning. "You done?" Rose looks up at me and asks. She's casually leaning against one of the registers.

"Uh, yeah, kinda? There was a girl in there; she boarded herself in because she doesn't recognize me as a hero. She's a Dryad, I think, so there's a bunch of vine whips around."

Rose stands up. "I'll get her after we're done. I'm mostly popular, so she'll probably recognize me, and I have some good reflexes too." That's an understatement; you're one of the best swordsmen in the city, if not the best.

Thomas abruptly stands up with a snort. Did he somehow manage to fall asleep in the, what? Five minutes I was gone? "Eh? Huh? Oh, Silvernight, you're back? Great. We've devised a plan."

"Albeit a bad one," Midas interrupts.

"With a high chance of failure," Sophia continues.

"But it's the best we got!" Thomas finishes with a proud, crazed smile.

————————————————————————————————————

With all of us in position, Cooper signals us with his flashlight.

Thomas and Midas waltz into the alcohol section, plainly in view of the Nazis. "Boy, Michael, do you think using boxed wine will really trick all of those rich snobs?" Thomas…is in desperate need of acting skills.

"I don't know, Ethan. But those guys are so stupid. They probably can't tell this difference between Cabernet and this stuff," Midas says in the same obviously bad voice as Thomas.

This- This hurts to watch…so, so much.

"Yeah! Those guys are so rich and snobby!" I think I saw a tear drop from Thomas's eye.

"Yeah! They probably just waste their money on random junk." Same case for Midas—tears.

"Do they even pay their TAXES?!" Thomas enunciates the last word while looking at Hector.

The man in question forgets that he's supposed to be evil and jumps off of his crates. "No! No, they don't! They squander all of our, the proletariats', money. They sit on their asses all day drinking and eating to their hearts' content while we sit and die. That's why I also don't pay my taxes! Just to be like them!"

Wow. Proletariat? That's a big word. Working-class people. But Hector doesn't seem like the type to know what it means; he could just be smarter than I give him credit for though. He does evade his taxes.

Or he's quoting an article he read online without knowing what it means. I don't think the path to living like the rich is to evade your taxes. A Nazi army might be a solution…if he remembers that he has one.

They're kinda just standing around in confusion. Some are still moving food, but I don't think these guys can move without orders. They're kinda just…idle.

Anyway, with Hector distracted, Sophia enacts her part of the plan. This took a lot of preparation. It wasn't really hard for her to do; it just took time.

With a slight tug on her fingers, barely-visible threads snap into place, surrounding the Nazis completely. One of them picks up a canister of sorts and chucks it at the web. It sticks to the web, as it would, and explodes.

"Guess that was a grenade," I mutter. Rose looks at me from across the rafters, then to the unburnt webs, then back to me.

"I guess it was." We chuckle at the futile attempts to break Sophia's webbing. Ahh, they won't succeed anytime soon. We, meaning Rose and I, were just waiting in case things went downhill.

In the meantime, Hector was panicking. He turned to look at the Nazis, but as his head was turned, so did Cooper around the corner. The three click their guns at the back of Hector. He puts his hands up and slowly turns around.

"Heh. I guess I deserve this, huh?"