Her opponents were revealed as the shadows passed, arranged in a rough ring around her.  Hellhound and her dogs took up half the clearing, in front of Shadow Stalker.

That’s Bitch to you, pal.

She held a metal ring in each hand, with two chains extending out from each ring.   The chains, in turn, were connected to harnesses around the heads and snouts of the ‘dogs’, each animal only a little smaller than a refrigerator.

Four dogs, then? Nice. I feel like they, besides Angelica, might be some of the dogs we met before, in 7.2 and 7.3. I should probably reread those sometime soon.

They were monstrous, with scaly, horned exteriors and exposed muscle.  Not as big or ugly as they could get, Shadow Stalker knew.  The smallest one was barking incessantly.  Three of the four were pulling on the chains, hungry to get at Shadow Stalker, clearly intent on tearing her apart.

The fourth one being Angelica, who’s had more training than the rest. I wonder if she still pulls on the leash on walkies.

Hellhound’s sharp pulls on the chains contracted the bindings around their snouts, which made them stop before they could get too close.

In other words, you really shouldn’t try to take out Bitch right now.

So was all of this planned? Did Tattletale Know that Shadow Stalker would be in the area to help protect the load, and the team quickly plan out a way to lure her away? I mean, it would make sense for Taylor’s plan to set things right to involve her confronting some of the things she perceives as wrong, such as Shadow Stalker getting to be a Ward.

Then, before she had succeeded in pulling herself all the way together, it happened again, another large form striking from another direction, passing through her lower body.

Another large form or the same large form coming back? You sound sure about it being the former, I suppose.

She sagged.  Gasped out in pain as another shape passed through her head and shoulders.  The darkness absorbed her cry so it barely reached her own ears.

Get fucked, Sophia.

It was only seconds later that the darkness dissipated.  She was on her hands and knees, barely had the strength to move, let alone fight.  She tried to raise her right crossbow, but her hand seized up, no longer under her own control as it bent to a pain like a bad Charlie horse.

A pain, or an impulse?

Yeeah, you just lost. Game over, harpy.

Her fingers curled back, and the crossbow tumbled from her fingers.  She still had one in her left hand, but she was using the heel of that hand to prop herself up.

If you try to use it, I have a feeling that one’s gonna tumble out too.

It took her only a moment to realize what that meant.  She climbed off Skitter, moved to run.  The darkness was oppressive, sluggish in moving through her, unlike ordinary air.  She was slower, wasn’t taking in enough oxygen.  

So that’s why his power messes with hers. It displaces the air, makes it hard for her to breathe in shadow form.

Against her will, her power instinctively adjusted, shifted her into a middle ground between her regular self and her shadow state.  It left her slower, heavier.

Oh jeez.

…that might explain why she had some trouble getting out of the containment foam at the gallery, besides the properties of the foam itself. Her body hadn’t adjusted back yet.

She baited me.

She sure did!

A massive shape tore through her, dissipated her entire body.

And there’s Angelina, too! Unless Rachel’s been training more of her doggos…

She pulled back together, but it was hard, painful and uncomfortable on an unspecific, fundamental level.  It left her breathing hard, feeling like she’d just put her body through five hours of the hardest exercise of her life.  Enervating, was that the right word?

I think Enervation, or something like that, is a spell in Hearthstone that gives you extra energy, but I don’t know what it actually means.

*looks it up* Drained of energy. Hm, you’d think that spell would drain energy from the opponent, then… *looks up the spell* Ah, it was Innervate, not Enervation.

Bugs were gathering inside and around her body, making it a little harder and a little more time-consuming to pull together.

I wonder if that has something to do with the Manton effect, à la how Vista’s power is hindered by the presence of people in the area she’s manipulating.

While she craned her head to one side to the next to search for something useful, her surroundings were plunged into darkness.

FUCK

YES

“Guess I don’t need to worry about the villain who saw my face, now.”  Shadow Stalker went solid and drew the razor-sharp tip of her bolt across Skitter’s throat.

The fabric didn’t cut.

uh… right, spider silk, really tough stuff.

Skitter struggled to get free, but Shadow Stalker’s body weight was too much for her to slide free.  She gripped the girl’s wrists with her hands, pinned them to the ground.

Oh good, seems she’s conscious.

“Irritating,” she spat the word.  She could always go into her shadow state, stick the arrow inside the girl and then return to normal.  The problem with going that route was that it left a very characteristic imprint in the victim.

Hm, yeah, I suppose it’d be easy to identify the murderer.

She would need a way of covering up the evidence.  Something she could hit Skitter with afterward that would make the wound too messy to analyze for evidence.

And I’m very deliberately using that word. It’s what she is. She’s a murderer.

Skitter cocked her head a little, as if analyzing Shadow Stalker from a different perspective.

She hasn’t seen how Sophia acts while alone in costume before, nor has she (to my knowledge) gotten to see Sophia in action, in costume, while she knew it was her.

I feel like this moment is Skitter thinking about the fact that this is Sophia, a supposed hero, catching Skitter, a supposed villain.

“What are you looking at?” Shadow Stalker spat the word, “Nothing to say?  No last words?  No begging?  No fucking apologies?”

Skitter went limp, letting her head rest against the ground, the water lapping over most of her mask.  Dark curls fanned out in the water around her, swaying as the water rippled.

Uh.

Taylor?

She loaded her crossbows, fired at the figure on the far left and the far right of the trio.  No reaction.  She dove after the remaining one.

Hm. But is that one real? Maybe she did pull the stunt I described after all?

She made contact, drove the bug girl’s face down into the water.  She shifted into her shadow state, straddling Skitter.

Ah, looks like she found the right one.

The girl turned over of her own volition – easy enough, as Shadow Stalker was barely solid, but when Skitter tried to stand, Shadow Stalker resumed her normal form for a second – just long enough to force the girl back down.

Well, shit. What now, Skitter?

Picking one of her non-tranquilizer bolts from the cartridge, she held the point of the ammunition to Skitter’s throat like a knife, “Game over, you little freak.”

It might seem like it, but is it?

I’m not sure, because Taylor is a lot more resourceful than I am.

More bugs were flowing from the area to join the swarm, bolstering its number enough for it to split again.  She wasn’t close enough to be sure of a hit, and she didn’t want to waste her good arrows, so she delayed, leaped forward to close the gap.

If there’s enough bugs in the area, she could potentially keep doing this until she finds a hiding spot to pull a proper shell game con from while Shadow Stalker’s getting too frustrated to consider it anymore.

I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen, but it might work in theory.

The swarm split once more, making for four vaguely human figures in total, each cloaked in a cloud of flying insects.

Oh damn, more shells this time. Nice!

Shadow Stalker snarled a curse word.

One figure turned on the spot, moved as if to slide past Shadow Stalker.  She lashed out, striking it in the throat, failed to hit anything solid.

Yeah, if you knew Taylor better, you wouldn’t even bother with that one. Although in that case she might anticipate that and make that the real one… “I know you know I know” can get pretty complicated sometimes, and suddenly nobody knows anything.

Shadow Stalker closed the distance, placing herself at the intersection between the two bug-shrouded figures.  Holding each crossbow out in an opposite direction, she fired at both targets at once, snapping her attention from one to the next in an attempt to see which reacted to the hit.

Huh, nice. Choosing all the shells at once is one way to find the prize, if it is actually there.

That said, Taylor could still have both shells react, regardless of whether she’s under one of them.

One slowed, began to topple.  She lunged after, in pursuit, loaded her crossbow and fired two more shots into the center mass of Skitter’s body while airborne, then kicked downward with both feet as she landed, to shove the girl into the ground.

Except Taylor is clever and would know that you’d attack the one that reacted most visibly…

Her body weight dissolved the blurry silhouette into a mess of bugs.  A trick.

Gotcha!

Snarling, Shadow Stalker wheeled around, ran in the direction the other half of the swarm had gone  Had the girl’s armor taken the bolt?  Had the crossbow shot missed?

Both are quite possible.