I was already scrambling in Grue’s general direction, the mailbox well behind me.
I felt a surge of relief at realizing that Cricket had abandoned her hostage in favor of going after Grue, to initiate a brief exchange of blows.
While Grue has a gun and is pretty good at hand to hand, Cricket seems to be parahumanly good at dodging hits. Grue, however, has the darkness on his side.
Hm… maybe he should employ the shadow man tactic again, to make Cricket dodge an attack that isn’t real, setting her up so she can’t avoid a real one.
Unfortunately, my relief was short lived, because the combat wasn’t brief in a good way. Grue fired the gun twice, and twice she dodged the bullet, standing only ten and seven feet away from the barrel. It wasn’t superspeed, either, though she was quick. Her movements were simply too efficient, and if there was any delay in her reactions, I wasn’t seeing it.
It’s almost like her power is literally to have zero reaction time. Or maybe it’s her perception of time that’s affected, so that she can think and react at (to an outside observer) high speeds, but not move her body at increased speeds.
If it’s the latter and she can’t turn it off, boring conversations must be hell.
He swung a punch as she closed in. Cricket leaned out of the way, then swung her scythe to rake him across the chest. From the way he staggered, I knew she’d struck home.
Well, shit.
He jabbed, she avoided it as though it were easy, then followed up with two more swings, and he failed to avoid either. He staggered back, clutching one arm to his chest.
Don’t die on us, man.
He blanketed the area around them in darkness, filling the clearing, and Cricket immediately switched to swinging blindly and ferociously around herself as she advanced toward where Grue had been. Grue backed away, but this had the unfortunate effect of putting him closer to Hookwolf, who was doing much the same as Cricket.
Trapped between a blindly swinging murderer and another blindly swinging murderer.
Y’know, I’m not sure that’s how that saying goes.
Grue turned and ran to create some distance and avoid being hemmed in.
Fortunately there’s a third dimension in this world.
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