That’s her power, he reminded himself, you didn’t kill her.

I guess they or other PRT employees have fought her enough that they know she can “come back” from seemingly fatal attacks.

But his gun had done a surprising amount of damage.  Was it some interaction with how she pulled her new shapes together?  A specific wavelength, a weakness to lasers?

Hehe. Perhaps… perhaps not… 😉

He wasn’t about to complain.  He wheeled around, fired on the other villains.

I’m not sure that’s the greatest thing to be doing after getting surprised like that, but at least it’s presumably not going to do more than normal against the others.

An injured Ballistic opened fire on Vista, discharging a series of pieces of rubble at an angle.  It struck the ground just in front of the girl and fallout from the impacts showered her.  Each shot drove her back further, buying him a chance to limp to Sundancer’s side.

Hm.

He touched the darts that were fixing her to the wall, sending them flying into Weld’s face.

…nice touch. No pun intended.

I’m honestly not entirely sure which side I’m rooting for here.

Kid Win unslung his laser rifle and fired at the villainess.  His first shot grazed her, as one flap of her wings carried her higher into the air, but the next two hit the mark.

Pew pew!

I’MMA FIRIN’ MAH no

One struck her in the shoulder, leaving a hole large enough to fit his hand through, the other struck her in the side of the head, doing a similar amount of damage.

When she takes this kind of damage without dying, it might be time to reevaluate whether this person is actually a person.

Genesis dropped from the sky, exploded into a mess of dark smoke and pebbles as she struck the ground.

Ah, fair enough.

Trickster, this seems like a great time to go into theatrical mode and play up how Kid Win just killed your oh so precious teammate.

Feeling a moment’s panic, he checked the settings on his gun.  Normal levels, no anomalies.  It could heat metal and other inorganic materials, cut through more fragile materials, but against a person, it wouldn’t do more than hurt and maybe leave the mildest kind of burn.

That’s another fair reason to start wondering if that was actually a person or not.

Or to start wondering if you really fucked up when making that gun.

Surely Trickster would want the latter.

Then the wall moved beneath his hand, and he heard Clockblocker shout, “Get down, Kid!”

He let himself fall, simultaneously realizing he had been leaning against Genesis, in her gargoyle-like form.

Oh jeez. Did Clockblocker just try to tag her, only to get swapped with Kid?

Weld slammed into the villainess, his left hand in the form of a heavy miner’s pick.  It did a surprising amount of damage, but she didn’t seem to care.

Ooh, nice.

And yeah, she probably doesn’t care because that isn’t actually her. Tattle mentioned that one of her projections had been blown up and “she” had come back soon after in a different form.

She gripped Weld around the face with a claw, raked his chest twice with criss-crossing slashes of her other hand, leaving deep gouges in the metal.

Ouch.

The same noxious black smoke that she had been breathing began to billow out of the hole the pick had made in her chest.

Great, another outlet for it.

So is that smoke what these projections are mainly made out of on the inside?

Clockblocker charged, but Genesis shoved Weld so the two heroes stumbled into one another, delaying them long enough for her to leap into the air.  She beat her wings to keep herself aloft and out of reach.

Damn.

Flechette threw a handful of darts at Sundancer, pinning the girl against the wall.  

Nice. Doesn’t stop her from moving her mini sun around, but nice.

Somehow Flechette had avoided Trickster’s attention.  How?  Kid Win turned to look, saw that she was standing so her body blocked Trickster’s line of sight to both the darts and his teammate.

Niiice. He can’t swap what he can’t see, so the trick is to make him not see what he needs to swap!

Better keep that in mind for later, Grue. Just in case.

So he can only teleport what he sees?

Oh, you didn’t know that.

I think I might’ve gotten too used to having Tattletale around.

So did Flechette figure that out or did she just get lucky?

Kid Win moved to mimic Flechette’s technique, running to a position where he would be between the injured Ballistic and Trickster.  He cocked his spark pistol.

Nice.

He was nearly lined up for his shot when his gun disappeared from his hand, an awkwardly sized piece of wood taking its place.

Damn. I guess Trickster figured out what he was doing, swapped himself with someone who would be able to see the gun, and then swapped the gun.

A second later, his mask and visor cracked against a hard surface.

Uh-oh. Did Trickster just teleport Kid?

He had to grip the wall to steady himself and keep from falling.  He’d been teleported.

Yep.

I can make something like this, which is brilliant, then I go and dismantle my fricking hoverboard to get parts for a project I never even finish.  Idiot.

Ahaha!

Kind of relatable, honestly.

Ballistic marched towards Vista, who was trying to climb to her feet.  He was intercepted by Glory Girl, who slammed him into a wall.

Woo! Go Glory Girl!

She punched him, drove her knee into his gut, then slammed him against the wall again, to keep him off-balance and hurting.

Oof. Nice.

Ballistic slumped against her and grabbed at the collar of her costume for support.  A second later, Glory Girl was a blur, disappearing into the skyline.

Whoops.

The Manton effect might keep him from just making people rocket off, but it doesn’t apply to clothes, and people tend to be attached to clothes. I doubt anyone would want to fight Ballistic naked (except Narwhal, I suppose), so he’s got a pretty solid loophole there.

His attacker gone, Ballistic fell onto his hands and knees with a grunt.

Looks like she got him to feel it, at least.

His spark pistol sported a small power core that used spatial warping technology to magnify and then reabsorb a steady electrical current.

Huh, neat.

The barrel was wired with a helix-shaped electromagnetic rail, based on some of Armsmaster’s old data on the ‘hard’ light Purity and Dauntless created.  Nanomolecular, ionically charged rifling on the barrel’s interior was arranged to guide the fired charges into a rough elliptical shape, which sustained their shape and consistency the longest.

This is either well-written technobabble or confusingly phrased semi-realistic science.

I can’t tell which, which is exactly why the former option has the word “well-written” in it.

*rereads a couple of times*

So basically the gun gives a physical shape to an electric charge, and through nano-magnets in the barrel, it makes that charge elliptical because that’s more sustainable?

In laymen’s terminology, it was not unlike a power bar that was plugged into itself, with a small addition that made each revolution of the current larger than the one before.

Hm. Alright. Sounds like something you’d want to avoid in most circuits, but here it’s being controlled and taken out of the system.

An attached battery kept the current going.  The shots themselves were ‘hard’ electricity condensed into balls, which meant they had a physical impact to them, due to how they carried and transferred kinetic energy.   Given how the weapon charged, waiting a few seconds between shots meant the next shot hit harder, up to a limit.

I see.

Any time Genesis moved to attack, Clockblocker set paper in her way, edge towards her, or he tried to duck in close enough to touch her.  Giving up on more physical means, she exhaled a cloud of the choking smoke.

Nice.

Clockblocker and Weld both worked together to minimize the spread of the cloud, using paper and plywood, freezing it in place with Clockblocker’s power.

😀

Kid Win decided they had a handle on that.  It was up to him to help against Ballistic and Sundancer.

Alright, Kid, whatcha got?

As he climbed to his feet, breaking into a run before he was even standing straight, he raised his spark pistol and fired off a series of oversized blue sparks at Ballistic.

This ought to work better than firing at Trickster, at least. Unless Trickster intervenes again.

Trickster managed to teleport him again, swapping his position with Ballistic’s.

Yup, there we go. This time Kid might’ve been prepared, at least.

The forward momentum of his sprint was enough to get him out of the way of his own gunfire.

Ah, that’s good. 🙂