Gregor was keeping up his steady pressure, alternating between blasting Trainwreck and blasting Mush with one hand and aiming at Skidmark with the other.

Damn, Gregor, taking on three at once!

Skidmark used his power to push away the worst of the slime, but it was clear he was losing.  His power wasn’t strong, it didn’t have much more push to it than a strong wind.

Unless layered, of course.

Any attempt to get it as effective as it had been at the edge of the arena took time and multiple layers of the effect.

Yeah.

In short, Gregor could make the slime more easily than Skidmark could get rid of it.

Good job, Gregor. 🙂

My bugs told me we were close to Lisa, Charlotte, Jaw and Senegal.  I caught Minor’s attention and pointed, and he put Bryce down long enough to give me a boost up to the top of the wall that stood between us.

Nice.

I straddled the wall and waited for Brooks and Minor to figure out how to get Bryce up to me so I could pass him down to the others.

Hm. Any particular reason you want to do this? Just so you can have only one or two people taking the long way around?

From my vantage point, I could see more of the battle unfolding on the far side of the mall.

One powered Merchant charged Faultline and collapsed through the ground she had strategically weakened.

Huh, that’s a neat use of her power.

She kicked him several times in the face before the next member of Skidmark’s group tried to take her on, drawing and pointing a gun.

The great equalizer… but Faultline can just cut it in half, can’t she?

Faultline drew her feet apart, and then dropped through the floor of the platform in a spray of splinters.

…alright. Won’t that just put her next to the first Merchant cape, though?

To her right, the red-headed woman was striding towards Scrub.  He aimed a shot and missed by a fraction, and she didn’t even flinch.

Badass.

Another try, another miss.  As she got close, he let his power go haywire, and a dozen flashes erupted in close vicinity to him.  None touched her.

This seems to be far more than just agility.

She had her gun drawn, but she didn’t shoot him.  Instead, she grabbed him by the collar, then wrenched him to one side so he tipped over the side of the platform and fell the twenty or so feet to the ground below.

See ya.

It wasn’t enough of a fall to guarantee that he was out of the fight, but she seemed confident enough to turn away and move on to the next target before he’d even finished falling.

Out of the fight or not, it’s going to take him a little bit of time to get back up, and his range seems to be relatively short. 15 feet, maybe?

It’s worth noting that he does seem to be getting better at controlling it now.

From what I could gather, he needed some kind of loose matter to form the body of his other self.

Oh… Less Weld, more dual self. It sounds like he can make a trash copy of himself and maybe control both bodies like a hivemind.

Dirt, compost, trash, maybe even sand.  Problem was, however fantastic his surroundings might have been for this five minutes ago, Labyrinth was screwing him over by cleaning things up, maybe inadvertently.

Neat!

One upper arm, his naked upper body and his nearly bald head were all exposed and vulnerable.

Sounds good to me.

Scrub had climbed up to one corner of the platform, and was keeping to the edge of the fight.  His intent was clearly to be close enough to Faultline’s group to possibly tag them, but not so close that one of his uncontrolled blasts would catch a fellow Merchant.

Yeah, Scrub is going to be incredibly dangerous to go up against when he gets control of his power, but for now he needs to move tactically to make sure he hits the right people.

Alright, let’s get back into it!

The battle was still ongoing.  Gregor the Snail was here, but unlike the others, he wasn’t operating in Labyrinth’s world.  He passed through the walls of the maze, spraying streams of slime at Trainwreck, who had apparently advanced halfway up the stairs by using his hands to help him walk.

Oh. So Labyrinth does have the power to pick and choose who’s affected by her changes. She just hadn’t set Faultline to pass through it for some reason.

Trainwreck retaliated by throwing a chunk of stairs at Gregor with one hand while trying to block the stream of slime with the other.

But do those stairs exist for Gregor?

The section of stairs hit the wall of the maze just in front of Gregor, some of it bouncing over to pass through Gregor.  Not real, as far as he was concerned.

Nope. Judging by Hive, he couldn’t even see what Trainwreck thought he was throwing.

What did this look like to Gregor?  Was he standing in the mall as it had been, while Trainwreck seemed to stand on thin air?  Or was Trainwreck on the ground?  I couldn’t parse it.

If I remember correctly, Oni Lee seemed to stand on thin air while affected by Labyrinth’s power… then again, he also teleported and promptly fell down. Was Labyrinth toggling whether the power worked for Oni on and off so that his footing disappeared the moment he teleported to it, only to reappear a moment later?

Probably not.  I knew that by leaving him here, I might be leaving him here to die, but the chance of him surviving anyways was pretty slim. Besides, bringing him would slow us down, and I wasn’t sure we could afford that.

That is true.

I shook my head a little, as if it could cast away the layers of little justifications and excuses I was putting together.

At least she recognizes her rationalization.

I was searching for a rationale, a reason to leave him behind.  Also, maybe, I suspected I was trying to give a reason to the fact that I had almost no sympathy for the man.

I mean… when all this started out, I think I made it pretty clear that I didn’t have much sympathy for just about anyone in the ring who was at this meeting in the first place by their own volition and with full awareness of what it was (the last thing is the point Bryce gets off on, and I don’t have that much more sympathy for him either). To be fair, at the time I didn’t expect it to get quite this gruesome, but still.

I really don’t care for most of those injured or killed in this.

I feel like this says a lot about how thoroughly unsympathetic Wildbow has made this group.

If I was going to leave him there, I’d own up to what I was doing.

This is a good development, though. Taylor is realizing her tendency to rationalize things and taking a conscious step to being more honest to herself.

Brooks helped Minor to get the boy to a standing position, while I watched Thomas struggle on.  He was getting weaker, fast.  The blood loss had been too severe.

So… just gonna stand there and watch this man die?

I mean, I don’t think you can help him, and whether you should is highly questionable, it’s just that I find this behavior somewhat surprising coming from Taylor.

Skidmark had several parahumans working for him, and I didn’t know all their powers.  Maybe Thomas would get care.

Do you really think he’ll make it much further? It sounds like he’s about to collapse completely.

Maybe Skidmark would attend to his people.

Yeah, I’m sorry, Taylor, but no. Just look around you. Remember who ordered this carnage in the first place.

Skidmark doesn’t give a shit.