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.

It was so quiet I thought I’d been deafened by the sudden explosion.  Hookwolf’s delayed scream of pain and rage was a bittersweet relief.

I guess that’s what happens when you detonate something inside a darkness bubble. Although considering what happened there is roughly analogous to a sudden, strong outward wind (much like when Stormtiger releases his claws), I doubt the darkness bubble survived it.

Wasting no opportunity, Grue marched forward, gun in hand.  Stormtiger had been farther away, and lay face down on the ground, bleeding badly but intact, from what I and my bugs could see.  Grue stopped, aimed, and shot him once in each leg.

Nice work!

“Hey!” Cricket’s voice was strangled, strained.  I wondered if one of the injuries that had given her one of those scars had done something to her vocal chords.  She lowered one of the scythes toward Coil’s soldier.  “I got a-”

Did Brian shut her up?

Grue covered her and her hostage in darkness and turned toward me and Hookwolf.  The message was clear.  He wasn’t negotiating.

Hah, nice.

I was pretty sure I couldn’t have made that call, even knowing that stopping for the woman’s sake was almost inevitably going to lead to a worse situation.

Yeah, Grue is a lot more willing to potentially sacrifice a teammate. Pragmatic rather than cautious, and all that.

“Gun oil,” Stormtiger called out, whipping around to face Grue.  “I smell gun oil.”

Is that what he’s carrying? A barrel of oil?

Or… a coddamn bazooka?!

That would certainly explain why Taylor’s in such a hurry to get the hell out of Dodge.

Grue hefted the long metal object back with both hands, then flung it forward.

…that doesn’t sounds like something you’d do with a bazooka, though.

He didn’t drop both his arms as he let go.  Instead, he used his left hand to follow up with a directed blast of darkness to cover it as it rolled into the clearing.

I clamped my hands to my ears, painful as it was with the bandage on my right ear.

A grenade launcher? Though it sounds like he’s throwing the whole thing. Some kind of giant makeshift bomb? Why would he prepare to throw that towards Taylor was, though?

Grue’s right hand was already withdrawing a gun from his jacket pocket as he backed up.

Ah, okay, I’m going back to the barrel of oil, to be ignited with a gunshot once Taylor is out of harm’s way.

His arm jerked twice as he fired the gun at the oxygen tank he’d fetched from the back of the ambulance.  The first shot missed.  The second didn’t.

…close enough. Makes a whole lot more sense to keep this in an ambulance, anyway.

Options, options, what were my options?  Bugs?  They were around, but I got the impression that Hookwolf wasn’t going to suffer that much if I swarmed him, and Stormtiger had some kind of aerokinesis, which was bound to be pretty effective against the lightweight bugs.

And Cricket’s off doing who knows what in Grue’s darkness.

Knife, baton?  Not much better.   These guys were capable in hand to hand.  I wasn’t.

Taylor’s capable enough to hold off Sophia for a bit, but these guys aren’t Sophia.

Basically, Taylor’s fucked unless she gets really creative. Fortunately, that’s one of her strong suits.

Where was Grue?  I felt out with my power, and found him at the back of the ambulance with the driver.  Whatever he was doing, I hoped he would do it soon.  I needed his help.

Yeah. He’s more skilled at hand to hand, though I have to question even his ability to do something against these guys.

…if Coil’s woman is still alive, and makes it out of the cloud, getting Stormtiger to face Taylor might help. He can deflect, but he needs to know the bullet is coming. Probably.

I looked for Cricket, and found her in the blackness, dragging Coil’s soldier back toward us.

Welp.

I saw her emerge from the darkness, one of the miniature scythes buried in the woman’s upper arm, the other buried in her thigh.  With a full-body effort, Cricket swung the woman forward and pulled the scythes free.  Coil’s soldier rolled onto the ground before Cricket.  If her powers didn’t give her an edge in fitness, she was pretty damn fit for her frame.

Is the soldier conscious, or even alive?

Was Coil’s woman dead?  No.  The woman was breathing.  She was making lots of short, fast breaths, not moving, but she was breathing.

One out of two ain’t bad, but these E88 goons have a standing order to kill anyone they encounter, so I’m not sure how many more paragraphs it’ll last.

Hookwolf watched for a second before turning back to me.  “Maybe I’ll give Stormtiger some practice at getting answers out of people.  Those claws of his?  They’re compressed air.  Every second, he’s drawing in more air, shoving it into that claw shaped space, to make them denser, harder.

Interesting. Not much new information, but the fact that he’s continually making the claws harder might be worth noting.

I’m guessing this compressed air somehow sticks together and acts like one object per claw? Because otherwise, it should be possible to just blow them away, although… Stormtiger is basically continually reforming them. Maybe they’ll start dispersing if his concentration is broken.

And when he releases it…” he offered me a low chuckle.

Come on, Grue.  I couldn’t handle this alone.

When he releases it… I guess that makes for a strong outward wind, akin to an explosion? Is Stormtiger himself immune to being pushed by air?

Hookwolf turned back to me, “Suspiciously competent for an ambulance driver.  Pretty fucking sure that’s one of Coil’s people.  What are you doing with her?”

I didn’t answer.

Aw, shit.

That’s a good point. The E88 finding out the Undersiders are under Coil’s protection and even employment would be bad news. They’re pissed off enough at the Undersiders as it is.

My bugs reacted to a funny noise from the direction of Cricket and Coil’s woman, but I couldn’t hear it myself.  Grue’s power did strange things to sound.  I had more immediate concerns.

Strange things?

Interesting. That’s not the same as completely drowning it out, which is the impression I’ve been left with so far. We may have a solution to the issue of how Armsmaster was able to navigate the darkness here.

Hookwolf dropped his hand to his side, and I saw how the bullet had penetrated skin, but had failed to get any further than the interlocking grid of metal that sat in place of Hookwolf’s muscle.

I’m gonna consider that a confirmation – it explains how he manages to look human in spite of being made of metal, too.

It also reminds me of this comic. (tw: drawings of blood, death)

He smiled.  “I was hoping you wouldn’t answer.  It means we get to interrogate you.”

Why do I feel like your definition of “interrogate” involves torture?

“Handle her, Cricket,” Hookwolf spoke, pressing a hand against his collarbone where a bullet had struck him.

Hm, looks like he does feel it, just not very much.

The scarred girl with the buzz cut dashed forward, reaching behind her back to draw two scythe-like weapons, each only about as long as her forearm.

Mini scythes, huh? Nice.

I guess fighting with that would be like fighting with a sickle? Or maybe they are sickles and Taylor just couldn’t think of the word – she says “scythe-like”, after all.

But last time something an opponent was using was described by what it looked like, it turned out to spit foam instead of fire, so I’m not taking for granted that these weapons are ordinary.

Coil’s soldier turned to fire at the incoming villainess, but Cricket ducked to the right, then evaded left, in time with the noise of the gunfire.

Hm, interesting. She’s not immune, and she can’t deflect, but she’s a master at dodging.

Headcanon: Cricket has a lot of dodgeball trophies at home. I guess it’s only a matter of time before she gets booted off the team now, though.

The distance between them closed rapidly.  I didn’t see what happened next, as Coil’s soldier disappeared into the darkness and Cricket followed her in.

Hm. This could be tricky for both of them. Cricket can’t hear the gun pop off rhythmically to time her dodges, and she can’t see where the shots come from, but on the other hand the soldier can’t see where to aim.

By the way, unless her power involves something that would help her here, she almost certainly was using the rhythm of the shots (and maybe her view of the shooter) to dogde, not the sound. Most modern firearm bullets go at supersonic speeds (thus the crackle of a bullet speeding past – it’s a sonic boom), and even the quieter subsonic ones go very, very quickly. Dodging those based purely on when the sound reaches her, especially at this short a distance, would require not only a super quick reaction time, but super quick movements.

(Handgun bullets are not exempt from going at supersonic speeds, though they’re among the slower ones. They can rarely exceed 1500 ft/s, i.e. 457 m/s or Mach 1.34.)