No.

Crawler’s pause to grab concrete had bought me time to get my bugs into position.  They swept over Crawler, laying down braided ropes of silk joined by adhesive lines and thin gossamer.

Still not sure these are going to be strong enough.

Even caterpillars began offering their assistance, using the silk they produced for cocoons.

Using every resource available, I see.

He was a big guy, but it was a lot of silk.

Hm. I suppose so.

I could see how it hampered his movements.  There was even something approximating surprise on his face as he dropped down so all six legs were firmly on the ground, and his forelimbs didn’t extend as far as he’d expected.

Alright, I can accept this. They’re not strong enough to stand in his way, but they can weigh him down.

He tried to run and found himself hampered further.

And make his legs sticky.

Crawler sported two or three tons of physical prowess, and his power had fine tuned him into a physical specimen like few others.  My bugs had millions of years of evolution to refine the quality of their silk and their ability to produce it.

True enough. It’s good stuff.

“Damn it!”  Grue swore.  “Go!  Go!’

One minute, give or take.

We ran.  There was the sound of more rubble shifting out of place, and then a guttural laughter.  It sounded more like it came from multiple gargantuan people laughing in sync than it did from the one monster.

How many mouths does he have?

“More!”  His voice was even more unnatural, a jumble of individual sounds that only barely came together into something like a word.

Wait, what? Did he actually get hurt somehow? Or is he just thrilled by the fight?

Not so different from when I spoke through my swarm.  “Fight me!”

The impacts of heavy footfalls were audible as Crawler broke into a run, giving chase.  They were even tactile.

Is it perhaps that he’s seen the results of Sundancer’s power and wants to touch?

He was more than a hundred feet behind us, but I could feel his impacts shake Sirius.

Damn.

As my bugs struggled to catch up, my swarm sense felt Crawler stop, rearing up on his two hindmost legs.

Hm? What’s wrong, kitty? Timmy fall in a well again?

He caught at one corner of a building and tore, twisting his body to throw a chunk of brick.

Oh. That’s not good.

“Look out!”  I shouted.

My words were too slow.  The rock collided with Genesis, catching one wing.

Shit!

(One rock, three Undertravelers, yada yada…)

She collapsed to the ground, and both Ballistic and Imp fell the fifteen or so feet to the ground.  Imp shrieked as she landed.

Hey, Imp, at least you have the super useful power in this situation that you can avoid people noticing your embarassingly painful landing!

Or maybe Ballistic could stick his hand down and launch the Earth out of orbit!

“Three people, two fliers?” Tattletale asked.

Maybe you have enough time to let the fliers come back for Imp and Ballistic? Although Genesis might not be able to carry them in her current form, so maybe Shatterbird would have to make two trips.

“Can carry one,” Regent said.  “Too tired to carry more.”  Shatterbird landed and wrapped her arms around him.

Looks like he’s handling himself.

“I can try to carry the others,” Genesis’s voice sounded very normal considering her gargoyle-like face.  Bitch handed her a length of chain.

Alright, I guess she’s stronger than the pterodactyl comparison suggests.

“One minute and fifteen seconds.  Not sure if it’s paranoia or my power, but I think the bomb’s going to hit closer to the deadline than not.”

It’s also better for writing a nick-of-time escape.

Genesis gathered the chain into a loop.  As Imp and Ballistic found their seats and Genesis made motions to take off, there was the sound of shifting rubble.

Crawler, no. Bad kitty.

“Until?”  Regent asked.

Until everything goes to hell.

“They’re bombing the area,” I explained.

Tattletale, Sundancer and Trickster found seats on Bentley’s back.  Bitch climbed up behind me.  Imp materialized, for lack of a better word, dropping the effect of her power.

Hah. Hey there, Imp.

That left her and Ballistic.

Okay, so what you do is you let Ballistic launch Imp into the sky and–

*gets clocked in the face by Grue*

Grue and Sundancer made their moves, Grue swamping Crawler in darkness while Sundancer brought her orb around into the face of the building.

Ahh. Blinding him so he doesn’t jump to block the orb?

With her miniature sun, she sheared through the concrete and metal, zig-zagging the orb through one floor.

The supports obliterated or melted, the building crashed down to the street with enough force that the rolling cloud of dust and was enough to drive us back.

And then burying him to stop him from immediately following you. Sure, that might work!

He had to weigh several tons, but the building had him beat in that regard.

We hurried to gather.  Genesis landed.

Now you need to get out of here ASAP!

How’s the steed coming along, Amy, if that is indeed what you’re doing?

“One minute, forty-five seconds,” Tattletale said, “More if we’re lucky.”

Time is ticking down quickly!

We were so small.  Even in the scope of a single neighborhood, my power extending for roughly a thousand feet in every direction, it made us all seem tiny.  Even Crawler.

There’s a certain irony to that given the size of the creatures that are giving her that feeling.

But with their sheer number, they suddenly become big.

“Don’t use your orb on him,” Tattletale cautioned.  “Won’t do us any favors, and it’ll only make him stronger for the future.”

And that’s if it actually hurts him.

“Then what should I do?”

“There’s no civilians here.  Legend and the others have evacuated.”  I told her.  “The buildings are empty.

Except for the other Nine?

She nodded, apparently grasping my meaning.

“You go high, ‘Dancer, I go low?” Grue asked.

She nodded.

What does Grue– he’s gonna borrow her power?

I held back as they advanced, ready to make their move.  Ballistic caught Crawler with a projectile, and the monster went sliding.  Shatterbird hit him with a wave of glass to keep him down, and Genesis swooped down to smash him over the head with the wreckage of a small car.

It did surprisingly little to keep him down.

Well that’s helpful.

Flying bugs were gathering in formations, carrying the slower bugs forward and maneuvering the spiders to spin webs.  Smaller bugs, the useless ones, I directed to Amy and formed into dozens of decoys.  Millions of instructions a second.

But I’m not sure Skitter’s multitasking limits take the form of her not being able to multitask past a certain point. The way this is being described, it sounds like she’s losing focus, becoming one with the swarm. She is the swarm.

Estimates said that insects outnumbered people by two hundred million to one in worldwide population.  Part of that distribution was biased toward rainforests and other areas humans left uninhabited.

Welcome to beautiful Brockton Rainforest!

That’s a fuckton of bugs. And “insects” doesn’t even cover the whole phylum of creatures Taylor can control.

At the end of the day, that was just insects, and there were more creatures under my sway than the six-legged variety.

…like I was saying.

Taylor controls arthropods. It took me a while to connect the fact that she can control crabs and arachnids to that higher classification, but I got there eventually.

I could feel them in the earth, in the walls, beneath the pavement, even.  Even from the weeks after I’d left the hospital, I’d dismissed them as background noise, just sources to draw from in amassing my swarms.

Honestly, as far as creature control powers go, arthropod control is really good for always having some ammunition handy.

Now, it felt different.  My range was extended, and it wasn’t because I was distracted, cornered, trapped.  As Crawler noticed us and shifted his position to keep us all in line of sight with his innumerable eyes, I had a few moments to think, to experience my power at its best.

She’s going mad with power! Mad I say! 😮

He’s big, he’s strong, he’s ridiculously tough, but he’s no Leviathan.

Leviathan had a crapton of offensive power on top of his near-impenetrable flesh. Crawler has a decent bit of that too, but he’s definitely specialized in defense.

My spiders began weaving their threads into braids, the flying bugs directing them in and through loops of silk as the threads spooled out.  Where bugs couldn’t hover, they directed their flight into tight corkscrews to slow themselves.

So does that mean they’re making ropes, in the hopes of tying Crawler up?

Spider silk or no, I’m not sure that’s going to work.

I wondered if this was the most bugs I’d ever controlled.  The buzz of my power thrummed through me to the point that I was barely aware of myself and where I was standing.

Careful! Don’t lose yourself to the swarm!

It wasn’t just the number of  bugs, but the number of instructions.  Spiders were spooling thread, organizing by the amounts they had remaining.

I guess even Skitter’s multitasking has limits.

Vista, Clockblocker, Weld, Flechette, Triumph, Miss Militia, Assault… Glory Girl, Battery, Cache and the ghostly bear were joining them.  That left two more I couldn’t place.  They moved in formation.

Hm. The two she can’t place might both be Prism. Multicolored duplicates would be an appropriate power for that name.

Might as well do what I could to help.  I drew out arrows and words on the ground, with names by each arrow to point them to Jack, Bonesaw and Crawler.  With the arrow length, I tried to indicate how far the distance was to each of the enemies in question.

Nice, I think that’s gonna help out a lot. Not least by letting them cut off Bonesaw’s shenanigans.

They spent about ten seconds discussing it, then broke into a run, going for Jack and Bonesaw.  Good.

We reached the scene of the ongoing fight with Crawler.  Sundancer was off the dog and on the ground the second we could see him, creating her orb and increasing its size.  She was fireproof, but she didn’t have the ability to grant that benefit to others.

Probably a good idea to move the sun away before increasing the size too much then.

Once she was standing, the orb was free to grow.

There wasn’t much my bugs could do.  They settled on Crawler and found his flesh impenetrable.

It’d be pretty ridiculous if Taylor found that Crawler, for all his immunities and tough skin, was still vulnerable to bugs. :p

If he has any vulnerability to them, it’s that you might be able to make him chase a swarm of them like a laser pointer. :3

I began preparing web nets, drawing lines of silk between my airborne bugs.  Amy’s relay bugs had afforded me the chance to pick up far more bugs than I otherwise might have.  My attention flickered over my swarm.

Are you trying to catch Mannequin?

Nearly a million spiders.  They were only a relatively small percentage of the swarm itself.

Coddamn.

I had more ants, termites, flies, aphids, gnats and beetles to form the bulk of my army.

I sent the more useless ones toward Amy.  Not so many that I overwhelmed her, but enough that she always had more at hand.

Excellent. So what is she doing with the ones you’ve already sent?

Having gathered as many bugs as I could, I drew my relay bugs back and spaced them around the perimeter of my own range, effectively extending it by a block in every direction.

Sweet.

“Have to stall Crawler long enough to make a run for it!”  I shouted.

“Have to do it in the next eight minutes!”  Tattletale called out.

Ah, I see you found out the time. Honestly, eight minutes is more than I thought it’d be.

Grue was getting Sirius to keep pace with Bentley, who was brawnier and slower.

“Bomb hits then?”

“Sometime after then.  Could be eight minutes and ten seconds, could be fifteen minutes!”

Ah, fair enough. At least knowing the minimum time you’ve got is way more useful than knowing the maximum time.

I swore under my breath.  Eight minutes made for a deceptively small amount of time.

The heroes were gathered.  I couldn’t set them apart.  With few exceptions, they each wore an identical costume with full body coverage.

I forgot they’d be here too, in addition to any other villains falling into the trap.

There were subtle differences in height  and body shape, which let me identify the people at the extreme ends of the physical spectrum: Vista, who was the smallest, and Triumph, the most musclebound.  Weld wasn’t in the concealing costume, presumably to retain more of his shapeshifting capability.

Seems reasonable. It also wouldn’t be difficult to tell who the guy with the really heavy footsteps was anyway.