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Chapter 134 – BattlefieldHanna ran right at the cat-girl. Now that it was too late, she realized she’d lost her machine gun even before she did that slide on her back between the hairy man’s legs. The slide was stupid, and losing her primary weapon was much stupider. She had been so focused on facing the cat-girl that she had already made several critical mistakes. She didn’t know what she had done that had ripped through the makeshift carrying strap she had rigged for the M240G. Perhaps she could go back for it later.
And she was going to have to admit all of her mistakes when she wrote her report for Colonel Jack. She really didn’t like it when he read her reports and he looked at her with that disappointed look in his eyes.
Meanwhile, she had seen how fast the cat-girl was, so she didn’t have time to stop, turn around, and hunt for her machine gun in the middle of the brawl going on between the hairy man and Azure Crush.
The cat-girl opened her mouth to reveal two rows of teeth that were more like a tiger’s teeth than a human’s, and she hissed at Hanna. Hanna wondered what sorts of mutagenic chemicals they had used on this woman, because this woman was more cheetah or lynx than she was human anymore.
The cat-girl drew her right hand back, and massive claws popped out of her fingertips. As Hanna got within melee fighting range, the cat-girl made a vicious horizontal swipe.
The cat-girl was very, very fast. Just like a cat should be. But Hanna had seen the raised arm, and was expecting this very move. So Hanna didn’t have that much trouble leaning back out of the path of the swipe and grabbing the arm as it flashed past. She used her backward motion and her grip to throw the cat-girl over her in a jujutsu throw that was supposed to slam the cat-girl into the concrete with the impact on the cat-girl’s back and the back of her head.
It didn’t work. The cat-girl twisted in mid-air like a real cat and landed on her feet. Her hind feet, since the cat-girl’s arms were really more like front legs than human arms. The cat-girl used Hanna’s throw to throw Hanna in turn, and Hanna found herself flying through the air. Her first reaction was preparing to land at the feet of the cat-girl, but the throw was harder than that. Her next reaction was preparing to land twenty feet away and use a parkour move she had learned from Sergeant Scott to move farther away and prepare for a counterattack.
She realized that neither of those counters were going to be useful. She landed fifty feet away, on a roof, with an impact that knocked the wind out of her. The cat-girl was stronger than she looked. A lot stronger. This was going to be challenging.
Unfortunately, her .45 was knocked loose from its holster by the impact. Hanna considered that the alternative — given where the .45 sat under her armpit — was probably a dislocated shoulder. The .45 went skittering across the roof and off one edge.
And the cat-girl was already landing on the roof after a powerful leap. Hanna rolled to her left to avoid a slash from one of the cat-girl’s hind legs, which had claws just as long as those on her hands. The claws cut ugly grooves into the roof. She was glad those grooves weren’t in her abdomen.
Hanna leapt off the roof and pulled one of her bat-grapples in the same motion. She fired at a damaged column high up on a partially-destroyed three-story building within her reach.
It was a very pretty building. It looked like the pictures of religious sites that Riley had showed them. She didn’t understand religion, but she knew her mom believed in God, and she knew Alex had even met Higher Powers. Alex had even fought one. Hanna did not understand how you could have a Higher Power and be able to fight it and survive, but Alex had not told her the entire story yet. Hanna was fairly sure that Alex had helped one goddess fight the other goddess, but the part that did not make any sense was her impression that Willow Rosenberg was one of the two goddesses. Willow was very, very smart and very pretty and very friendly, but was definitely not a goddess.
Religion was very confusing.
It did not help that Janet said you simply had to have faith. Hanna did have faith in many things. She had faith in Alex, who did not have faith in herself but was more powerful than Hanna would ever be. She had faith in Janet, who loved her like a daughter even though Hanna was not Janet’s child. She had faith in Jack, who would run into a very literal hell of giant spiders and napalm explosions to save a teenager. She had faith in Cindy and Charlie and Grover and Willow and Riley and Graham and Jo. She did not have faith in something she could not see or hear or experience in any way.
She had faith in her own innate abilities, and the skills her father had taught her.
She swung toward the temple, and the cat-girl made an immense leap after her. That was a tactical error in a battle zone where there were fliers and ground forces with ranged weapons. Once you leapt that far into the air, you had a few seconds where you had no control over your flightpath. Hanna had extensive control over her flightpath, because she could shorten or lengthen her line, and she could release the grapple at any point, and she could use her second grapple.
And since the cat-girl had made a tactical error, Hanna took advantage of it. Hanna held her second grapple and fired it. She snagged the cat-girl’s hind feet, and with a swift tug flipped the girl so her hind feet were closer to Hanna. Since Hanna was still soaring up toward where her first grapple was set, that also meant the cat-girl was upside down and thrashing helplessly and screaming like an angry cougar.
Hanna swung the cat-girl so her body crashed hard into a wall. She released that grapple, lengthened her first line so she could land on the ground, and retrieved the first grapple as well.
And the cat-girl was already coming after her again. That was … not encouraging. Hanna pulled out her combat knife and turned to face her foe.
The cat-girl stopped for a moment and sniffed suspiciously. She asked in Korean, “What are you?” Hanna had no chance to reply with her limited knowledge of Korean before the cat-girl leapt in another attack, claws and fangs first.
Hanna managed to block the cat-girl’s left hand’s slash with her combat knife, but the right hand still clawed right through the front of her tac vest, all the way down to the body armor underneath.
Hanna used her left hand to grab her left bat-grapple. She fired it downward, ensnaring the cat-girl’s ankles, and with one swift yank, she dumped her opponent on her tail. But the cat-girl was strong enough to rip the grapple out of her hand with one flashing kick of her legs.
Hanna tossed the knife to her other hand so she could grab her right grapple. She pulled it out of its holster and fired it at the bridge of the cat-girl’s nose.
* * *
Riley dived for cover as a foot-wide white laser beam cut through the concrete wall he had been using as protection. He was used to planning advances and retreats, and looking for cover to make both work. He had automatically assumed he would need something like that for the laser-blaster and the fire-thrower, along with some means of hiding from sight to avoid the TK-wielder.
Oh, and he didn’t want to get stomped on by the ninety-foot giantess either. Graham would probably make a joke about taking the time to peek up the canvas ‘dress’ of the giantess when she walked over him.
He moved in a subtle advance, making sure he couldn’t be seen and that Valentine was clear. Normally, he would keep his teammates within effective distance of his position, but that wasn’t a good idea when they were facing two blasters and a TK wielder. But centuries of military doctrine needed more than a few minutes to adjust for this kind of battle zone.
Classic military doctrine was too rigid for a battle against maybe nine heavily powered threats and dozens of possibly low-powered threats, on top of the standard North Korean asymmetric warfare approaches. The ruins of those helos and tanks and APCs were testimony to that. Even fundamental military strategies had to be re-thought in those terms. Clausewitz was too stiff for this battle. Sun Tzu was more the right approach, because he was ‘high-concept’.
“So it is said that if you know your enemies and you know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss,” he silently quoted to himself. Well, he was counting on that one. Terawatt already knew what she was facing, and had fought similar enemies before, so she had a major advantage. Her four opponents lived in North Korea, which was so isolated that they probably had no idea there could even be a super-powered being other than them. They had no clue how to fight something like Terawatt, other than ‘just keep blasting like we did before’. And the North Koreans had obviously counted on that axiom, too. They had known exactly what the ROK and the Camp Casey forces would do, and the blue team had run right into an overwhelming offensive force they had no idea how to counter. If it hadn’t been for the colonel’s insistence on getting Teams One and Two in place for today, the red team would probably be blasting its way through Camp Casey right now and be heading for Seoul.
He switched over to the Tac Four frequency to give the commanders far behind him an update. “Delta to Alpha. Delta to Alpha. Enemy momentum blunted, possibly temporarily. Enemy supers are going to make the use of fighters and choppers and heavy armor ineffective at the moment. Maintain rear positions. Please advise when heavy artillery is ready to shell these grid sectors, as that may be our best tactic if we can’t deal with their ranged threats. Over and out.”
Man, he did not want to have to call heavy artillery down on his own position. Now if he could get all of his people clear of the grid coordinates first without losing containment on the enemy, even if he was still here, he might consider it.
He found a route around a broken wall and past a still-burning crashed chopper to a new position where he could advance or retreat if need be. Indirect strategies were essential against an overwhelming force like a giant who could just step on you, or a guy who generated a laser beam that could cut through buildings.
He used his little spec ops periscope to get a view of the battlefield. Tera was using her opponents’ strengths against them by flying so close to one that the others didn’t dare attack. Smart girl. He wished he had a way of building up her self-confidence without risking overdoing it.
Hanna and Az had advanced too far and separated themselves. They were supposed to work with their support team and not go play solo superhero. But he couldn’t send Lupo and Carlson off on babysitting tasks. He had tried calling both of them over the comms and hadn’t gotten anything, so they were either down or had lost their earjacks. He was just going to have to give them time to regroup. He hated that. Especially with Hanna, who was just a kid. Well, Az was just a kid, too, even if she was twenty-one. Just barely.
Valentine was doing exactly what he wanted, which was a huge relief considering he had never been on a battlefield with her before. Still, she was Delta Force. She knew what she was supposed to do, and when.
He located a squad of mutated soldiers who were trying to line up some MANPADS on Terawatt. He used his M203 to drop a grenade on their position, and he ducked back down out of sight. Then Valentine did the same, so the red team had no idea where he was.
As long as Tera had the four members of the advance guard tied up and distracted, he knew he could use his M203 effectively. But as soon as the TK-wielder had time to focus on him, his weapons were going to be worse than useless. Still, Tera knew that, and she knew he couldn’t provide useful support. Anything he fired at the advance guard was likely to get redirected by the TK-wielder.
Valentine opened up with a short burst on an advancing squad of things that used to be soldiers and now were more like the dead body of Dr. Deemer’s assistant. One went down and two other were obviously hurt but not out. The things were probably a lot more dangerous in hand-to-hand than a normal soldier, but weren’t really as dangerous at range. They were carrying AK-47s that had been crudely modded for oversized fingers, with no trigger guard and an oversized charging handle. Those AK’s probably had the safeties removed to make them easier to fire. He figured none of those ‘soldiers’ could possibly field-strip their equipment if there was a problem, given their misshapen hands.
He watched with his periscope. When the things tried to spot Valentine’s position, he opened fire on them and finished the job she had started.
Another laser beam came his way, and he dived to the ground as it cut through the crashed helo and also the damaged wall he was behind. He dropped to the ground and crawled as fast as he could to his next selected position.
* * *
Carlson got another look at the thing that was made of mud. Or maybe it was a guy who used to be a simple soldier and now was some kind of shambling thing. Did the North Koreans have no conscience or ethics or anything? You just couldn’t do shit like that to your own soldiers. That was wrong.
He put a burst of 7.62 mm into the thing, and it just ignored the bullets before it ducked behind a building. Shit! He needed to maintain his role, but he was really worried about Azure Crush, even if she was a bitch. That sasquatch thing she’d been fighting had looked absolutely indestructible.
A dozen mutated soldiers opened fire on his position. They had badly modified AK-47s. Too bad for them. He had an M32 and an M240G, one in each hand. Okay, reloading was a pain in the ass, but the firepower more than made up for it. In the next three seconds, he put three grenades and fifty rounds into the force. None of them got back up.
He ducked down and slapped in more grenades, even though the M32 was getting pretty hot. He definitely couldn’t afford to have the thing get so hot that the grenades cooked off inside it. That would be bad. Of the bad, as the colonel’s girlfriend would say.
He had a grenade frag in his left thigh, but he didn’t stop. He had to support his team and get them home. And he had to get home to Corinne, because who would be there for her if he wasn’t?
* * *
Jo Lupo was finally far enough forward. She slid out of cover and aimed her M203 at the first weapons carrier.
A girder of mud coiled around her weapon and tore it from her arms.
A tentacle of mud wrapped around her waist and yanked her backward.
She was dragged inside the body of the mudman, where she began to suffocate.
* * *
Alex tapped her earjack. “Alert. The flier isn’t a TK wielder. She’s a Magneto type. If you’ve got anything non-magnetic, fire it at her.”
Alex was still silvery, so it was easy to zoom up the inside of the canvas dress, along the spine of the giantess.
Seriously, they couldn’t give the poor woman anything better to wear than a canvas tent? And no panties and no bra? What was wrong with these jerkheads?
She zoomed up under the giant woman’s hair and grabbed on with her hands. The hair was like grabbing handfuls of really long string, and Alex had been working out. A lot. She was able to hang on with her hands and use her TK for something else. All of her TK.
She hadn’t been able to stop Gojira, but the giantess was way smaller. Maybe one third the height and probably less than a fiftieth the weight. Alex reached out with her TK and found those carotid arteries. Gojira’s blood vessels had been like trying to stop a flood from pouring through a tunnel big enough to drive through. This was totally different. She could feel each carotid artery was like a pulsing pipe about three or four inches across. And the force of the pumped blood was way, way less.
She clenched her jaws and squeezed. It was hard. Really hard. Hard enough to give her a throbbing headache. But it was still possible. She got both arteries clamped shut, and she just hung on. She knew it would have to take a lot longer than four seconds, just because the giant had so much more blood and such a huge head.
She didn’t expect that after only about fifteen seconds, the giantess would just sag limply, and then fall face-first on top of a couple of ruined buildings.
Laser Guy was strapped into a protective chair on the giant’s shoulder, and he screamed all the way down. Flame Guy was in front of the giantess, and he had to fly as fast as he could to keep from being slammed into the buildings below and squished like a bug.
Alex darted out of the bushels of hair and went for Magnet Girl, but metal shards came flying up from all over the place. Shards of metal guarded the girl, and more shards came searing through the air at Alex.
* * *
The soldier waited until the struggling woman inside his muddy form went limp in death. He didn’t like being nothing but a shapeless mass of mud — or something like mud. But he was a loyal soldier, and he could now do something for his country that no one else could.
He dumped the limp body on the ground and moved forward. But he heard something. The woman had just gasped for air.
He turned around. Or rather, he turned the part of his body that could see. The woman was coated in mud, but she was alive. She had held her breath and gone limp and feigned death. He didn’t know the enemy had anyone who could hold their breath like that. She was already up and on her feet and scrambling around the corner.
His last sight of her as she ducked around the corner was her right hand. It was coated in mud, but it had three rings on its fingers.
Three grenade pins.
Before he could react to that thought, explosions deep inside his form ripped him apart and splattered mud all over the area.
* * *
The purple mutant ran up to the unconscious laser-blaster. He didn’t attempt any sort of medical treatment. He slapped his hands on the man’s body, and then inhaled sharply.
He put his hands out and felt the energy as a viciously bright white light seared forward and burned a hole in the ground.
He grinned ruthlessly and extended his arms to blast a vicious laser beam up at the flying enemy woman in white and black.
* * *
Jill was under fire and pinned down behind the remnants of a wall. She’d had a secure, hidden spot until the giant fell and nearly crushed her. She’d had to scramble out of cover. Unfortunately, a squad had spotted her when she moved.
She couldn’t stick her head out, but she had a spec ops periscope, too, and she was using it.
The purple-skinned mutant didn’t seem to have any powers that she could detect. And he moved like he was vulnerable. He used careful military techniques to move up behind the squad that was shooting at her, and he climbed into the rubble around the giantess. He made his way over to the laser blaster — and Jill still didn’t see how a laser could be white light, because lasers needed to be a coherent beam of a single wavelength, while the blaster had been putting out a column of white light — and just grabbed the body.
Then he blasted a hole in the rubble with a copy of the injured man’s powers.
How was a power mimic even possible? That made no sense to her.
She didn’t have time to consider it, because now they had another front-line threat, after Terawatt just finished dropping two of them!
She immediately called into her comms, “Alert! The purple guy now has laser blaster powers! He’s some kind of power mimic! Don’t let him touch you!”
Then she saw what he was about to do, and she called, “V to Tera, Move it! He’s targeting you!”
Despite the incoming on her position, Jill tried to put a few rounds into the guy. But he extended his arms at her and blasted her cover into pieces.
As she scrambled for safety, it dawned on her. If this guy could mimic powers by touching someone, why didn’t the red team let him mimic some of their more dangerous powers ahead of time?
* * *
Alex heard the warning over her comms. She was still silvery, but she didn’t think that would protect her from getting sliced in two.
She darted to the side, and the beam of white energy seared past her. She wasn’t getting past Magnet Girl’s cloud of protective metal shards, but she had an idea. She darted around it so Magnet Girl was between Alex and the laser.
This guy wasn’t as careful as the real Laser Guy, and he sliced right into Magnet Girl’s steel bodice. The girl screamed in pain, and the metal fragments guarding her suddenly went flying all over the place. Alex zipped in and shocked Magnet Girl in the back of the head while unhooking the steel armor and casting it aside.
Magnet Girl was really small. Alex was guessing she was maybe 4'8" and thin. Without the steel protection, that was really clear. And she had weird scales all over her forehead and going off into her uniform, so maybe she had scales like that all over. But she was tiny enough to hold in the air. So Alex grabbed Magnet Girl with her TK and flew down to put her on a roof.
Flame Guy flew up behind her to try and take advantage of her not being a complete jerkhead and not just letting Magnet Girl fall over a hundred feet to her death. He threw a big fireball right at her back. That really made her crabby.
Fake Laser Guy tried to burn a hole right through the building she was over so he could roast her from below, even though he might burn through Magnet Girl, too. That made her even crabbier. Were these guys just total jerkheads?
She used her spare TK to grab that fireball, and she threw it right at Fake Laser Guy.
* * *
Hanna gasped as the wind was knocked out of her again. The cat-girl had simply batted the second grapple out of the air, and then had torn the handle out of Hanna’s grasp.
Hanna had also lost her combat knife, and was resorting to whatever she could find, which was why she was fighting with a length of rebar like it was a quarterstaff.
The cat-girl had another length of rebar and was fighting back. The cat-girl’s length was maybe half a foot shorter than Hanna’s, but had twenty or thirty pounds of concrete in a host of lumps all along its length. And the cat-girl was strong enough that she was still wielding her rebar at least as fast as Hanna could.
Hanna took another really painful shot in the ribs, and went flying backward into a wall. Several hundred pounds of rubble cascaded down onto her, pinning her in place. She watched as cat-girl moved in for the kill.
“AG to Tera, requesting help ASAP.”
The cat-girl grinned ferally as she raised the rebar over her head. She stopped and gloated, even if it was with a snarl.
And a bolt of lightning hit the upper end of the rebar.
The cat-girl screamed like an injured cheetah as she convulsed and then toppled over onto her face.
* * *
Grover spotted the three mutated soldiers who were maneuvering to get around behind Sergeant Carlson.
Not happening on his watch.
He slipped up behind the three guys. They all looked like they were halfway between Doc Deemer and his dead caveman-mutated assistant. That sure put his problems with being invisible into perspective.
Two of the men ducked down and snuck forward, while the third one stayed back and covered them. Grover moved up behind the third soldier.
One chunk of broken concrete to the head, and the guy was down. He grabbed the guy’s AK-47 and emptied it into the other two men.
He dropped everything, checked that there wasn’t anything visible on his hands, like brick dust, and he moved back around the battlefield to pick off another couple of badguys.
* * *
Azure Crush groaned in pain. She was feeling more like Azure Crushed right then. That fucking walking drain clog was knocking her all over the fucking battlefield. She’d been shot a couple dozen times, too, but that was pretty much nuisance value. She was bulletproof, at least for what these fuckwads were firing, but she definitely wasn’t sasquatch-proof.
He threw her by one foot, and she went flying toward a bunch of the soldiers. They tried to scramble for safety, but she still landed on a couple of them. Hard. She was pretty sure they weren’t going to be getting back up after that impact.
She rolled off the crushed soldiers and went for the closest truck. A dozen soldiers fired on her, but the bullets bounced off her skin. They hurt, but not nearly as much as getting the fuck pounded out of her by Mister Hairball, so she kept going.
She spotted Icebitch off to the side, making ready to turn her into a Sno-cone, so she grabbed up two really surprised soldiers, and she threw them. Icebitch hurled a blast at her, and it caught the two soldiers instead, turning them into chunks of ice.
Az got to the first truck. She kicked the part where the trailer was hooked onto the back of the cab, and the trailer came loose, tipping over and dumping everything onto the ground. She threw the cab into Mister Hairball, knocking him into what was left of a wall. She threw the trailer at Icebitch.
Icebitch cast a huge wall of ice. The trailer crashed into it and stopped.
Mister Hairball jumped to his feet and roared in fury.
Oh, fuck, she’d given him ideas. He threw a slab of concrete wall back at her.
* * *
Jo Lupo checked, and that goddamn mudman was still moving. He was pulling in more of the mud that had been blasted all over the place. How the hell did you kill a pile of mud?
She scrambled back and retrieved her M203, which was fortunately right where it had gotten tossed. She moved back and put an HE round right into him.
And he started to reform again! She put another HE grenade into him, and another, until he was splattered all over the ground and none of the mud was moving.
She moved around a shattered wall. It had a massive slit burned right down the center, so she used it as cover and observation point, too. She peeked through the opening and spotted a row of soldiers on one of the far trucks. All of them were lining up RPGs at Az.
“Lupo to Az, take cover!”
Az didn’t react.
* * *
Grover had been looking for an opportunity like this. He had taken down a dozen soldiers, but this was his best chance yet.
There were two female soldiers off to the side with those one-person anti-aircraft systems. MANPADS, if he remembered what Riley had told him. The women were doing their duty and watching for incoming support aircraft, instead of watching the fighting going on all over the place.
He slipped up behind them and took both of them down with a chunk of concrete. Then he grabbed one of their weapons and fired on the truck full of RPG users.
The blast was bigger than he expected. He dived into a small depression off to the side of the road. And there were more explosions. And then some more.
Everyone who wasn’t hammered by the blast waves was scrambling madly for cover. Anyone who came his way was likely to choose Grover’s spot to dive into, which was going to be a big problem.
* * *
Azure Crush went flying when the blast wave hit her. It didn’t do nearly as much damage as it did to the soldiers around her, but it was murder on her hearing.
Frosty the Snowbitch just hit the dirt and formed a fast ice shell over herself. Mister Hairball just got bowled over, which just pissed him off even more.
She would’ve complained about being black and blue from all this shit, but she was already solid blue.
* * *
Alex used her TK to punch Flame Guy in the face, and she let him chase her back toward the north, where all the explosions were going off. Fake Laser Guy went running after the two of them, but he couldn’t cover anywhere near the territory she could. He was only going maybe fifteen miles an hour at his best, and that didn’t count when he had to climb over rubble or cut around wrecked buildings.
After working with Yuki, Alex was pretty sure Flame Guy’s fireballs wouldn’t hurt Ice Lady, but that didn’t mean Alex couldn’t try something sneaky.
Flame Guy threw another blast of fire at her, and she used her spare TK to slam the fire down on top of Captain Caveman, who was really smacking Az all over the place.
* * *
Hanna had finally managed to dig herself out of the rubble. She had lost her machine gun and her sidearm and her grapples and her knife and most of her tac vest and half of her body armor.
Fighting the cat-girl had been awesome.
She was bruised and battered. She was clawed in several places, none of them serious enough to put her out of action. She wanted to do it all over again.
She tapped her earjack again. “Action Girl clear, but unarmed.”
No one said anything.
“Action Girl. Can anyone hear me?”
That wasn’t good. How long had she been without comms in a fluid battle zone where intel was their best weapon? Well, their second-best weapon, after Terawatt.
She knew she had voice but not sound on her earjack, because Tera had come to her rescue when called. She needed to pursue a guerilla warfare approach until she could either acquire weapons or meet up with a teammate.
“Action Girl to team. I have no weapons. I apparently have no audio, either. Am moving to acquire both.”
She slid around a damaged wall and listened for movement. Nothing. She moved forward.
On top of a collapsed wall, the purple-skinned man was kneeling while clearly trying to line up a shot on Terawatt with just his hands. That made him another energy caster. She couldn’t let him do that.
She leapt up behind him and struck him hard on the back of the neck.
He fell over backward, and his hand slapped limply against her ankle.
She suddenly felt incredibly weak. It was like she had just run a hundred miles through a desert. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed onto the rubble.
The man grabbed her ankle, and she felt like all of her strength was draining out of her body. What was happening? She couldn’t think. She couldn’t get up. She couldn’t pull away from his suddenly-powerful grasp.
He pushed her down the pile of rubble, and she rolled limply to the ground. It hurt so much! It was like all her toughness had abandoned her. She needed to get up, but her muscles had turned into useless limpness.
He stood up and flexed his arms. She could see that he suddenly felt strong. She could see he was enjoying the sense of power.
She could see he was going to kill her with his bare hands.
He grinned cruelly and flexed his hands like he was going to choke her to death. She struggled to lift her arms to defend herself, but she couldn’t do more than make them twitch.
Suddenly, he looked up past her and grabbed for his sidearm. He didn’t make it. A three-shot grouping from an M203 chewed into his chest and knocked him backward. He fell back and tumbled down the far side of the rubble.
Jill Valentine came running up, weapon at the ready. “Riley’s had us looking for you ever since we got your broadcasts.”
Hanna gasped, “Too weak … Stole my strength …”
Jill checked, “He didn’t just copy your powers, he stole them? Damn it!” Jill leapt to the top of the rubble so her body was minimally exposed but her weapon was at the ready.
Hanna watched as Jill’s shoulders slumped. And Hanna knew. The purple man had stolen her toughness, too, because he had three rounds in him and he had still run off in the seconds before Jill looked over the top of the rubble.
* * *
Az took a cheap shot at Mister Hairball while he was on fire and not paying any attention to her. She knocked him thirty feet through the air. He hit the ground and started rolling.
Az gritted her teeth as Frosty the Snowminge quickly covered him in ice crystals, putting out the fire.
He jumped to his feet, and his hair started growing back. It was growing back at an unbelievable rate. Az stopped and stared in shock. By the time he caught up with her, his hair was all grown back like it had never been burned. Was this guy indestructible?
He started to take a swing at her, but Carlson off to the side put a fuckload of machine gun ammo into his face. Mister Hairball turned and charged off that way.
Az tackled him around the ankles so he couldn’t get at Carlson. It was like tackling a mountain, but she managed to bring him down. She owed Carlson a big one. She wasn’t letting Mister Hairball rip him in half.
* * *
She shook some of her icicles off her hands, and she looked around at the battlefield.
Two weapon trucks were still on fire, with dangerous munitions cooking off. She hurled as much ice as she could onto those flames. She pulled in as much heat as she could from the fires, so she felt better.
Many of her fellow soldiers were down, and most of the rest were trying to re-group. The advance guard against the evils of the southern pretenders was all down or in serious trouble. They had been told they were unstoppable, so she did not understand how they had been stopped. Clearly, she needed to vanquish the flying foreign menace.
She heard a sound like fingers snapping, and she whirled about, her ice blasts ready to go. But there was no one there. At least, she didn’t think so until an invisible fist struck her in the face.
* * *
Az had lost her earjack when the building fell on her and Mister Hairball, so she hadn’t gotten any hot news updates for maybe half a minute. Or however long she’d been fighting the guy since then.
But she heard it when Lupo screamed, “Az! That purple guy’s a power leech! He can pull your powers away from you, leaving you unprotected!”
Well, fuck. Az heard the warning just as Mister Hairball kicked her off and rolled to his feet again. And that Purple Sucker came stumbling in between them, so she leapt to the closest roof to get out of his reach.
Purple Sucker looked bad. He was bleeding purple blood all over the place. He said something in Korean that sounded like an apology, and he grabbed Mister Hairball.
Az hadn’t thought anything was really going to slow down Mister Hairball, but the guy just collapsed and folded in on himself. Even worse, all his earlier injuries just came back like it was his powers that were holding them off.
Purple Sucker just stood up and shouted his confidence, whatever the fuck he was saying. And he jumped way up into the air so he could land on the roof in front of Az.
But he didn’t have any idea of how strong he really was. He soared way over her head and plunged right through the roof and the ceiling to crash into the floor.
She yelled at Lupo, “Hey! Purple Sucker just ate Corporal Hairball, and now he’s stronger than me! Avoid at all cost!”
“Finn to base. Finn to base. Main force has been blunted. Flying fire caster still a threat, one super-strong ground threat. Most munitions and heavy weapon teams are cooked. Several platoons of infantry still active. Battlefield now nearly clear for assault waves.”
* * *
Alex heard Jill’s broadcast over the comms. Oh, crud, so Purple Guy was now super-strong instead of having lasers, and she didn’t dare get anywhere near him because he might be able to jump over and grab her and suck her powers out of her body. Eww.
And here came Flame Guy again. But she was now back near Ice Lady’s area. And he had plenty of fire and his fire didn’t hurt him like Mister Cready, but he didn’t have a lot of extra lift. And as long as she stayed silvery, the fire he was throwing at her wasn’t that bad a threat to her.
She used her TK to slam Flame Guy down into one of the walls of ice. He really hated that. So she did it again. His fire kept dimming, but as soon as he got away from the ice it came back to full power.
Then Alex noticed that Ice Lady was struggling to her feet. Alex wondered who had clobbered her. Since Ice Lady was getting back up, it probably wasn’t Az. Or Hanna. Or any of the soldiers. That kind of left it up to Grover. Good on him.
Flame Guy hurled more fire at her, and she used her spare TK to swat it toward the trucks that hadn’t been blown up or set on fire.
Ice Lady finally spotted Alex. So Alex flew toward Ice Lady and dropped twenty feet lower. She made herself a really easy target, and then she yelled at the ice-caster, “Over here!” Okay, she didn’t know if North Koreans even learned English.
Ice Lady immediately hurled a blast of freezing cold and ice her way, which was just what Alex wanted.
Flame Guy was closing in behind her, so she jetted straight up and she used her TK to slam him downward right into the path of the ice blast. Flame Guy screamed like he’d been dipped in acid, for about half a second. At the end of the half second, he was unconscious in a coating of ice. He crashed to the ground and didn’t move.
Alex didn’t give Ice Lady a chance to take another shot at her. Alex dropped to the ground so she had as much TK as possible, and from fifty yards away she punched Ice Lady in the jaw with over two hundred pounds of TK. The ice-caster went flying backward and landed with a thud.
Four more soldiers popped up on the other side of a wrecked truck trailer, and she hit them all with a burst of lightning. They all dropped before any of them got a shot off. She flew back toward the middle of the battlefield. “Tera to team. Fire and Ice down. Next task?”