“I’m fine where I am.”

“This isn’t a request.”

She’s far more forceful about it than the others we’ve seen. With a bossy attitude like this you’d almost think she’d be the one in charge of the team.

“Is that so?  You going to make me?”  He was nearly restored.  He could fight now if he needed to.

I wonder if Shatterbird was the one who recruited Burnscar.

Forcing someone into the team like this is probably a bad idea, honestly. Unless the recruit really does “thrive among” them, they’re not going to be giving their all, and may look for ways out, including tactics like selling the rest of the team out to authorities or otherwise sabotaging them.

“Yes.  I know who you are, Hookwolf.  I spent some time researching your history.”

“Not that interesting.”

We know a little of it, and I’m with Hookwolf on this – what we know so far isn’t all that big.

“I beg to differ.  You ally with the Aryan groups.  Run one, but your motivations seem to be different.  I have guesses as to why, but I’d rather you tell me.”

Hm, interesting.

We did get narration suggesting Hookwolf was indeed a Nazi earlier, but I suppose it could’ve been misdirection.

Hookwolf struggled to pull himself together.  He used hooks to pull the metal back towards his core, where it could be reabsorbed, recycled.  It didn’t take much of his reserve of internal energy to create and move the metal, but it took some, and he’d rather not run out.

Hm, another potential weakness, in that you can wear him out, although he probably still has more endurance than most people.

It was a risk, he knew, but he needed a few moments to pull himself together and rebuild his body.  He let his head and upper chest emerge from the core, taking form in the hollow metal ‘head’ of his canid form.

I suppose his brain is in the core, then?

And all of a sudden we’re back to the discussion of brains and their locations.

“What do you people want?” he asked.

“Person.  Singular.  I am the only member of my group here,” Shatterbird informed him.

Yeah. No surprise here, of course, but it might be a different story with Hookwolf.

“Arrogant.”

Hmm. I suppose as long as you assume the goal was attacking and defeating Hookwolf and his Chosen, it could come across like that.

“You can be arrogant when you’re strong enough.  You should know, Hookwolf.”

…oh yeah, the kettle’s got a point about the pot. Though Hookwolf doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as arrogant as Kaiser was.

Hookwolf lunged for her, only to find that the residual glass that remained on the ground was denying him traction.

This is a pretty versatile power, apparently.

His metal claws failed to find grip, failed to crack the glass, even with the heavy impacts and his impressive weight.  Closing the distance proved slower than he’d hoped.

Hm.

I’m sort of torn between POV bias and the fact that this is a dark-skinned woman versus a Nazi racist with a long list of homicides to account for (it’s quite possible that’s why she’s here), as far as who to root for. The fact that Shatterbird is also a super deadly member of the Slaughterhouse Nine doesn’t help.

Let’s just see how this plays out, I suppose.

He rose onto two feet, standing straight, and reconfigured his arms.  With spears as big around as telephone poles, he punched through thirty or forty panes of glass all at once, then did the same with his opposite hand.

Oh yeah, that works a lot better. Nice.

It was slow progress, as the glass constantly reformed and pieced itself back together a few feet ahead of him, but he was closing in.

Reforming barriers, such a pain.

She abruptly dropped the barriers and changed tactics.  The majority of the glass in the area formed into one shape, a cone of solid glass, pointing towards the center of the purple-red sky, two and a half stories tall.

Woah.

What’s the plan here, Shatterbird?

Raising one hand, she shot it straight up into the sky above, until it was just a speck.

Oh cod.

Crystal rain?

Cricket pointed, and he led the way with her following directly behind him.  As he walked, he wasn’t moving his limbs quite so much as it might appear at first glance.  Instead, he extended one growth of metal as he retracted another, only generating the illusion.

Huh, that’s neat.

A hundred new parts growing each second to suggest shifting musculature, a cohesive form, when he was anything but.  Only the core skeleton, the shafts of metal that formed the limbs from the shoulders or hips to his knees,  actually moved without retracting or extending.

He’s a rather shifty dude, that Hookwolf.

Glass rose from the ground to fit together into a window that floated in the air and he smashed through it with one of his forelimbs.

Shatterbird trying to say “stop, I wanna talk with you”?

Another barrier appeared, thicker, and he smashed that as well.  The glass began to form into dozens, even hundreds of barriers.

It’s like a whole street full of people carrying glass panes during a chase scene.

He quickly found one strike wasn’t enough to clear the way.

Hm, and if she puts a thick plate behind him too, she’s got him boxed in.

Also, she can probably shatter these plates again if she wants to, likely killing Cricket, or at least wounding her.

He pulled himself together, in his favored quadruped form.

Woof.

Looking up to the window, he created a tall spear from between his ‘shoulders’.  Cricket leaped out and caught the pole, slid down until she could hop off and land beside him, skidding on the glass covered surface.

Heh, that’s a neat way of getting down.

…

AU where Cricket works in the fire department.

She looked annoyed as she looked down at her shoes, raising one foot off the ground to investigate the underside. Glass had embedded in the soles.

Eesh.

So was all the glass out here affected too when the glass indoors turned its points upward?

He would have told her to ignore it, but he couldn’t speak.  For that matter, neither could she.

Worm is generally not big on characters speaking during fights, but with these two, if they get in a fight, there’s more reason for it.