Cricket passed one of the mini-scythes into one hand and then used her newly freed hand to wipe bugs from her skin.  They were gathering on her, and she was starting to feel it.  Good.

Right, their stings should be a bit harder to dodge. At least there’s someone in the enemy’s party whom Taylor’s power can work offensively against.

Again, that pulse emanated from her.  She maintained it this time, and my bugs began to suffer for it.

…though not without complication, it seems.

Their coordination suffered, they began to move slower, and their senses – such as they were in the darkness – began to go haywire.

Well, that ain’t good.

After a second or two, I thought maybe I was starting to feel it too.  A bit off-balance, nauseous.

This reminds me of Agitation, though back then I turned out to be wrong about Taylor feeling side effects of her bugs having to navigate in warped space. The headache she got back then was Panacea’s work.

Grue was hunched over, his hands on his knees, but I wasn’t sure if that was Cricket’s power or the injuries she’d inflicted.  From the way Cricket was moving, I gathered that she couldn’t see us.  Was it echolocation?  Did it not work if she simply blasted the noise continually rather than use it in bursts?

I suppose blasting the noise continually would cause the returning sound to get drowned out.

Maybe Taylor should try to keep Cricket doing this continually so as to negate the sonar, but that comes at the expense of the bugs and her own coordination.

Then every bug in the area reacted to that sound I couldn’t make out, the one I’d heard when Cricket went after Coil’s soldier.

Hm. Curious. Last time, it seemed like it could’ve been something from Cricket vs Coil-lady, but that’s not the case right now. Is this something Cricket’s power allows her to do? Crickets are known for being obnoxiously loud.

It was loud enough for them to hear through the darkness, but… entirely out of my range of hearing.

Maybe she can communicate with bugs, and didn’t count on being up against an enemy with direct control over them?

I couldn’t say for sure, but I got the impression the ones closer to Cricket had heard it a fraction of a second sooner.

“Grue!” I screamed into the oppressive shadow.  “Move!”

Well, seems Taylor has pieced together that Cricket is doing something, even if she can’t quite tell what.

Cricket turned toward him and lunged in one motion, bringing both scythes down in an overhead swing.  Grue moved out of the way just in time.

Maybe it’s a form of sonar/echolocation.

“She has radar!” I shouted, my voice barely audible to myself.  Didn’t matter.  Grue could hear me.

A radar would be completely blocked by the darkness, presumably. This is a sonar, which the darkness just does “strange things” to.

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.