“You okay?” Grue asked me, as he cleared the darkness within one foot of the both of us.
“I’m bruised but yeah. I should be asking you that question. How bad is it?”
Grue took some nasty hits there. He really could use a spiderwoven outfit like Taylor’s.
He banished the darkness around his body, and in the gloom, I saw how the blades had neatly cut through his jacket and t-shirt to draw criss-crossing lines of red across his chest.
This may or may not be an accurate image of Grue.
Grue caught her by the wrist mid-swing and pulled her off-balance before she could follow through.
Nice work!
She moved fluidly, considering the blade buried in her upper leg. She reversed her grip on her weapon with her free hand, stuttered her power to create what I took was another radar pulse, then readied to swing it at Grue.
She’s good at going with the flow.
I twisted the knife, and pulled it out of her leg with a two-handed grip. Or, to rephrase, I pulled the knife through her leg, dragging it horizontally through the meat of her thigh, toward her hip, and out.
Oooh, that’s gonna hurt.
She toppled, and Grue put his hand on my shoulder to pull me back away. Cricket lay on the pavement, pressing her hands to her injury.
Enemy down, for now.
That leaves Hookwolf Kong.
Hm… not wasting an instant to retaliate kind of sounds like another instance of no reaction time.
I suppose that’s also potentially a natural result of bullet time perception. I’m leaning more and more towards the power that lets her dodge bullets being that.
When I was sure I could move without falling over, I lunged, knife in hand.
I’d hoped that if I was quick about it, I could act before she used her radar again.
Sonar.
I wasn’t so lucky. She was already moving by the time I realized she’d made another pulse of noise, scythe points whipping around toward the side of my head, where my mask provided only partial coverage.
Damn.
I had too much forward momentum to avoid walking straight into the incoming blades.
I half-fell, half ducked, and instead of driving my knife into her back like I’d intended, I wound up burying it in the side of her thigh. Whatever technique let her dodge bullets, it apparently didn’t work if she couldn’t see.
Hey, sweet maneuver!
As much as it might have hurt, she didn’t waste an instant in hefting her weapon to retaliate and swinging down at my head. I wasn’t in a position to get out of the way.
Ah, shit.
Grue raised his borrowed gun and his arm bucked with the kick. Cricket was oblivious as the gun fired off several times in a row, but whatever she was doing with her power was screwing with Grue’s ability to aim.
Hm, interesting. I was assuming the effect on Taylor was a result of her getting disorienting inputs from the bugs, but if it affects Grue too, that’s evidently not the case.
I’m thinking this might be specifically some form of infrasound. Consciously inaudible sounds near the border between infrasound and audible frequencies have been connected to feelings of fear, unease, sorrow and anxiety, sleep disturbances and even optical illusions through resonance with the eyeballs (there’s a hypothesis that such sounds are responsible for many supposedly haunted locations). This kind of sound causing disorientation and nausea is not far-fetched.
None of the bullets struck home. He stopped. Either he was out of bullets, though it seemed too soon for that, or he wanted to conserve ammunition.
Yeah, might wanna save those for when your aim is getting better.
I climbed to my feet, feeling my side protesting in agony. The blade hadn’t penetrated my costume, but the sides of my stomach weren’t armored and the cloth had done little to soften the jab of it, even if it had prevented me from being cut or disemboweled. Cricket was bigger than me, stronger, and she knew how to use her weapons. It had hurt.
ow
I doubled over and crumpled to the ground.
Grue shouted something, but his words didn’t reach me through the darkness.
Probably “SKITTER!”
So yeah, with what this chapter has shown about how sound works with the darkness (namely that it’s heavily muffled, but not completely blocked, which makes a lot of sense if you consider the darkness to be similar to a dense gas), Wildbow is off the hook for the whole gallery Armsmaster thing. At least mostly so.
Cricket emitted another radar pulse, then lunged for Grue.
I don’t blame Taylor for not being intricately aware of the difference, or for not caring at the moment, but it still bugs me a little every time she calls it a radar.
She caught him in the arm, this time. Then she backed off, going for the continuous, sense-warping noise to put my bugs on the fritz once more.
It’s the Undersiders’ turn to attack.
I was three paces from Cricket when I felt the sound die off, then resume again for one brief second. Another radar pulse.
“Careful!” I shouted, adjusting my momentum and hurrying to back away. Too slow. She was already pivoting to swing at me.
Uh oh.
The handle of one scythe struck me in the side of my throat, the actual blade hooking around behind my neck to halt my retreat.
Uh oh.
Before I could do anything, she pulled me toward her. I stumbled forward, and she adjusted her grip to swing the other scythe up and into the side of my stomach.
Um. Hi there.
Annoying as it was that everyone seemed to have a way of dealing with my bugs, I was at least putting her in a position where she couldn’t both find us and deal with them.
Yeah, that’s fortunate.
I was having trouble getting a sense of her powers. I’d heard of her, seen pictures, read up on her on the wiki and message boards. She was rarely more than a footnote, typically a suspect in a murder or arson case alongside Stormtiger and Hookwolf. Never had I come across something like ‘Cricket has limited precognition’ or ‘Cricket is a sound manipulator’.
So far it’s seemed like a mix of echolocation and either “no reaction time”, “bullet time perception” or “limited precognition”…
Hm. The echolocation could be seen as an extension of bullet time perception, I suppose, since it’d give her brain more perceived time to actually process the echos.
The bugs started to fall away from her, losing their grip or ability to navigate through the air. Knowing our advantage would soon disappear, I advanced towards her, drawing my knife.
Better make use of the time you know where she is and not vice versa.
I checked on Hookwolf, and found him scaling a building a distance behind me. Was he trying to rise above the cloud of darkness to spot us or get his bearings?
Hm, good luck with that, I guess. Grue, you might want to send some darkness up the side of that building.
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.
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