The screaming intensified. It brought back old, bad memories. The chaos of fighting an Endbringer.

  I could see the younger guy with the apron on facing me from my position on my side. His eyes were rolled back in his head, and he was having a seizure from the looks of things. He was bleeding profusely from his nose, eyes, and ears. A wet gurgle emanated from his chest, and he half-coughed, half-vomited up a spurt of blood.

  Some of it splattered on my face.

  Silver had gone utterly silent in my head. I wasn’t sure if she was in shock or something of the sort. I didn’t have the time or mental bandwidth to talk through this with her.

  Part of that was because there was this… oppressive static in my head. I don’t know how else to describe it, other than a massive, overbearing white noise pressure that I could feel as much as I could hear. It made me want to grind my teeth, and I was doing my best to block it out so I could pay attention to what was going on, play my part for the remaining time before I struck, and to try to document this… carnage.

  The guy in front of me was reduced to intermittent twitching, his eyes had rolled back down, and gone glassy. They were a chocolate brown color.

  Behind him and off to the side, a girl was pulling herself along the concrete floor with her hands. The skin on her arms was bubbling up into large, vile-looking pus-filled boils, and I could see more bulges forming on her back, distorting the shape of her shirt. One of the boils on her right arm exploded, and a fist-sized larva tumbled out.

  It was milky white, with large, serrated back pinchers and beady black eyes. It had ringed bands along the body with rearward-facing black spines. The thing immediately made a beeline for the dead cook in front of me. Another larva popped out and appeared to be eyeballing me.

  It had no more than started to move when a pair of large sneakers smashed it and its sibling into a jet of paste and guts across the floor with a heavy whump! Mr. Big jumped off the upper catwalk and put an end to the two bugs. I watched him turn and raise his foot.

  I started to move to shoot him with a quill, but I realized far too late what he intended. He wasn’t squishing another bug. The girl’s head met a similar fate to the two larvae, and he watched and waited for the rest of the undeveloped larvae, but they seemed to expire when the girl did.

  Another woman on the other side of the room caught my attention in the havoc. She had risen to her hands and knees and was in the process of standing up when her clothing started smoking. Long, dyed braids were partially obscuring her face, but from what I could tell, it was set in a look of intense concentration. She stood up on shaky legs, and a moment later, she burst into fire from head to toe. I could feel the radiant heat from the flames on my face.

  She threw her head back and had her fists clenched at her sides as her clothing burned away to ashes. A look that bordered on orgasmic, with her mouth open, and her flames blazed brighter for a brief second before curling and twisting off her form to evaporate into the air inches above her skin. She was left naked, trembling, and her dark skin drenched in sweat.

  A… drug that causes trigger events?

  Scant few others were still alive at this point, the rest of the group having met grizzly ends. One man’s rib cage had torn through his skin, malformed and misshapen, halted mid-transformation into a bigger, tougher-looking form. The rest of his body was in a similar state, with different-length arms and legs in varying states of blimping up with muscular definition when he’d died. Like a new Brute that had failed halfway through triggering.

  The lights in the room flickered, and half of them burst inside their glass enclosures, putting the room into half-shadows as a man rose upright into a low hover. The tips of his shoes were almost touching the floor, and his arms were half-spread at his sides. I couldn’t see much in the way of facial details, because his eyes and open mouth were radiating an intense ruby-red light. Lit from within, like the light was emanating from his throat, and from the insides of his eye sockets. The room seemed dimmer around him, but it could have just been an effect of how intense his light was.

  An older woman was on her hands and knees with her back arched and her head hanging down, and screaming her lungs out, strings of saliva hanging out of her mouth. She was rapidly blinking between being there and an exact mirror image of her, but made out of golden energy. The energy form was displaced by about a foot off to her left side, causing her to rapidly bounce back and forth between energy and meat and bone, jiggling between one position and the other.

  Mr. Big walked over to her and waited. I had a good idea what he was waiting for.

  Something was potentially wrong with her. If she were wrong, she’d die. If she pulled through, she’d live. Maybe. That was my assumption, having seen him stomp out the life of another person already.

  A dark, twisted thought bubbled up in the back of my mind as my anger built in my chest.

  It’s not murder. It’s mercy.

  My lips pulled back into a snarl. I refused to let myself believe that. Maybe these people could be saved–but first, the immediate threat in the room had to be dealt with, and then, the Master. Otherwise, I’d potentially be in a position of having to face the remaining people in here.

  Mr. Big had his back turned, and his attention was on the flickering woman. Now was an opportune time to strike. I rose to my feet as stealthily as I could manage, brought my arm up, and fired a trio of quills directly into his back.

  Maybe I’d be better off taking some precautions with the others? They seem to be sort of out of it, but I don’t know if they’ll side with or against me if their heads are still muddled.

  I reoriented my arm and fired off an additional pair of quills into the fire woman and the light-face-guy. The woman looked down at her naked abdomen in surprise at the pair of finger-length quills sticking out of her skin. Her legs went weak under her, and she went down, followed by Lightface’s lights going out and collapsing to the ground.

  I hoped they didn’t wind up cracking their heads on the hard floor.

  Mr. Big turned around to glare at me, leaving the flicking woman for later.

  My hesitant fears from earlier about him turned into the sinking realization that he was, in fact, probably one of those pain-in-the-ass-Brutes I’d been concerned about. I shot him with the remainder of my quills. He looked down at the tight grouping on his pectoral, brought one hamfisted hand up, then pulled them out and tossed them to the side. Then his glare turned into a leering grin.

  He bent his knees and brought his fists up.

  I cursed under my breath and pushed my ability for further changes.

  More speed and better reflexes, and my pain whip.

  I flicked my left forearm to the side, and half a dozen pink strands extended out with a slimy smack. My muscles twitched, and my heart thumped away in my chest.

  Silver found herself and spoke.

  Are we going to die here, too?

  I had my eyes tracking every twitch of Mr. Big as he took two steps towards us. I felt like she was using my peripheral vision to look at the numerous, mangled, mutilated, and twisted corpses littering the floor. The veritable sea of blood and viscera.

  The answer to that question, Silver, is not just no, but fuck no.

  I lashed out with my tentacles, and Mr. Big didn’t even attempt to block or dodge them. They slapped into his bare right arm and swung around his back, wrapping around his upper body, shoulders, and part of his neck.

  Go down, you big asshole!

  I saw his eyes dilate, his mouth open, and his nostrils flare as he was injected with what I’d come to believe was distilled agony.

  “Hng!” He grunt-exhaled. Then he shot up a foot and a half taller, the lower hem of his wifebeater exposing a wall of abs, and his feet bursting out of his sneakers. He didn’t just get bigger; he’d visibly packed on muscle mass on top of the overall size. His arms and legs more resembled tree trunks, and his torso a wall of muscle now than just some mega-jacked guy.

  I had enough time to register a single thought.

  Well, fuck.

  Then it felt like a truck slammed into my right arm. I’d tried to twist and dodge, but he was scary fast. I was flung across the room and barely hit the floor to skid a few feet before my back slammed into the concrete wall hard enough to make me see stars. My right arm, which I was lying on, felt like it was filled with mixture of broken glass, barbed wire, and burning gasoline. I wasn’t sure if it was because my true form was better at managing pain, or because it’d been a good while since I’d last gotten really fucked up in a fight, but this level of pain was enough to make me suck breath through clenched teeth and to blink back tears.

  Silver whimpered in my head and cried out when I spiked the sensation from my arm by righting myself and getting back to my feet.

  A quick glance down showed that my right arm was hanging like a limp noodle, with shards of bone sticking out of my skin from shoulder to fingertip. It was oozing blood from the multitude of punctures, but it wasn’t gushing. Twinges of sharp stabbing pain in my right side tipped me off that I probably had a broken rib or three. I shoved a thought at my power. It wasn’t coherent; I didn’t have a specific structure or idea in mind. I was happy to take a grab-bag of whatever it belched out at the moment. Instead, I was concerned with simply fighting him.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Claws–the ones I’d been longingly missing since leaving my prison–slid out of the fingertips of my left hand, and both my left hand and arm itself twisted and shifted into a more familiar and limber shape. The claws were longer than average and looked more like a set of kitchen knives attached to my fingers. Silver let out another groan as a hexad of stout tentacles burst out of our back, piercing straight through the fabric of our dress. They extended out until they were generously over body-length, the group twisting and coiling to my sides and rear, each capped with a wicked-looking claw-barb. The claws were that familiar shiny black, but the skin was a milky, nearly translucent color that was more similar to Silver’s skin than my own.

  I bared serrated teeth at Mr. Big and let him know precisely what I thought of him.

  Wchh-hiss!

  He started to drop into a crouch, maybe for a dash, a lunge, or a tackle. I burst into motion myself.

  No twiggy legs to carry me around across the floor, to circle, duck, and dart in, dive and dodge to the side, in some money-brained dance of fools.

  Fighting in two dimensions was for fucking losers. Apex didn’t fight like that, unless it was for play-fighting with friends or rivals.

  Tentacles lashed out, stretching and flexing in different vectors to help offset the huge recoil of their thrusts. Claws embedded into concrete: three, four, or five at a time, but usually not all six.

  Flexing muscular hydrostats jerked me up, down, left, and right, in and out with blistering, eye-watering speeds. I attacked with my left arm and whatever free tentacle-claws I had available to me while doing my very best not to let Mr. Big land so much as a single touch on me.

  But it was very, very hard. He was shockingly fast for his size, deceptively nimble, and his hits cratered the concrete walls, ceiling, and floor. My power was furiously active the entire time while fighting. Despite the changes I had, I just felt slower and weaker than I should be, and like I was struggling to keep up with things I normally wouldn't blink a proverbial eye at. Multiple smaller tentacles clutched my mangled arm to my side and secured it. My new muscles in my single arm were strong, scary fast, and precise, but they were also wreaking havoc on my left shoulder, chest, and back. I could feel burning heat and sizzling twinges and pops as fibers that connected to and anchored the limb on my body struggled and snapped from the strain of whipping that arm around.

  Mr. Big wasn’t just strong and fast; he was also competent as a fighter. Someone who clearly had years of experience fighting as a parahuman. No apparent weaknesses jumped out to me in his methods or tactics, although he was constrained by the limits of his human bodily design. So I attacked those weaknesses, instead. It worked, but not particularly well because he was also regenerating his wounds at a furious pace.

  A tentacle claw sliced through the tendons on the back of one knee, which caused him to fall to that knee momentarily. My body sang with a chorus of screaming alarms as I twisted my torso and swung with my hand. Important things were breaking internally. That would have to wait until later, because this wasn’t an endurance battle; it was a fight for survival. Mr. Big wasn’t pulling punches, and I didn’t expect that his intent was to knock me out for whatever purpose they had.

  My finger-blades parted skin, muscle, and bone from his lower left hip up and through his right pectoral. He had the presence of mind to jerk his hips back when I swung, and I only took several mean chunks out of his outer pelvis rather than my intended goal of obliterating his upper femur and pelvis to immobilize him for an escape. It was still a truly grievous wound, and would have been excessively lethal on damn near anyone else.

  But Brutes were built different, as I was all too well aware, being one myself, and this one was some kind of regeneration-type Brute. A spray of hot, pressurized, gushing blood splattered my front from head to toe, and I was already flying backwards and out of the path of his left arm as it came down and smashed into the floor. I saw the wounds closing up and bits of his organs getting slurped back inside in real time.

  He stood up and cracked his neck with a loud crunch, in the momentary stillness and silence. It was just the two of us, a couple of survivors that were either knocked out or dying, and many corpses. The flickering woman had gone silent and had slumped prone, but was still flickering, at least. I wasn’t sure if she was going to make it or not.

  It looked like a massacre had taken place inside the large space. There were severed body parts and corpses everywhere. Blood was running across the floor and into the drain grates with the sound of a steady pitter-patter. I was wheezing, and my body was ranging from painful throbbing to sharp, stabbing pains from my head to my toes. I was soaked in blood in a way that reminded me of one of Amy’s import movies about a girl with psychic powers.

  Mr. Big’s voice was like a dry croak when he spoke. “You fight good.”

  I was in no position to correct his grammar.

  “Join us,” he rasped. “Power. Money. Allies.”

  He was buying time for his regeneration to work and for his next attack. At least, I was pretty sure. It worked for me, too, because my power was chugging along to try and repair some of the damage I’d accrued. Some of them were glancing blows from Mr. Big, which had still been devastating. My right thigh was fractured; I was nearly certain of it. A lot of the damage, sadly, had been self-inflicted. My own body–Silver’s body–was tearing itself apart and failing in numerous places because it couldn’t handle the strains imposed upon it by my maneuvering around and fighting.

  It was a calculus on my part, if maybe a little unconsciously. Better to tear a muscle in my back than to take another solid hit from Mr. Big. I knew that if he got a solid, center-of-mass hit on me, I was done for.

  I’d underestimated his ability and capabilities, and had overestimated my own. But, to give myself a little slack, it wasn’t like I could know that he was both immune to my knockout darts and seemingly benefited from pain that would cripple others. He’d put pressure on and had kept it on so effectively that I hadn’t had any real time to make upgrades and increase my capabilities further. Most of my energy was going to keeping myself alive and repairing what I could to keep moving.

  My batteries were low; I could feel it. An unsteadiness in my extremities, and sharp, twisting pain in my guts. Silver didn’t have the mass or energy reserves to spare for much, and I sort of suspected that my power was cannibalizing parts of her that weren’t immediately required for our survival, if the sensations in my belly were anything to go by.

  It was ruthless like that.

  But so was I when I was on my A-game.

  I coughed, which was agonizing, and tasted blood on the back of my tongue. “I don’t work with people who aren’t bothered by casual murder.”

  That got a dismissive snort out of Mr. Big. I pushed a change through because I knew my borrowed time had run out.

  “Then you can die with the rest.”

  I hated lizard-brained fucks like this. I didn’t know if he was some kind of psychopath, was brainwashed and mastered, or was just a plain old awful piece of shit. I didn’t care at the moment.

  Drawing a breath in, I coughed once again, but this time, out of new holes in my back. He lunged forward right as my vision was shifting, and I evaded to the side as the room was swallowed up in pitch blackness. A moment later, I saw the glow of his bulk turn around and lunge once again at the area I would have been in if I hadn’t moved twice more in the time since.

  I wanted to stop him. I wanted to save the survivors.

  I hated the fact I couldn’t. My weakness was a big part of the problem, but it would have been less of a problem if it weren’t for my god damned hubris putting me into this situation.

  Silver was right. Had been right. We needed to flee and get help. I should have listened to her earlier.

  Clarity in hindsight, yadda yadda.

  Two of my tentacles on my left side had been ripped out by the lunge Mr. Big had made across the room as I was deploying my smoke screen, but that was fine, I only needed two or three out of the six to maneuver, and having fewer simply limited my mobility options. I darted over to the high door as silently as I could manage, using my tentacles to clutch onto the catwalk rather than embedding them in the concrete.

  A slash, a screech, and a crash sent me flying through the hatch with my tentacles whipping around me furiously. A startled Mr. Small was halfway out of the chair he’d been sitting in, on the side of the hallway outside the door. His mouth opened, I deafened myself, and smacked him across the face with the body of one tentacle. He was knocked unconscious instantly and fell back into a half-seated slump.

  It was time to get the fuck out of here. Right now.

  I blasted the hallway with more smoke and launched myself down it in the direction from which I could taste not-awful-smelling air coming from. Fire doors went flying as I battered them out of their frames with my tentacles and rocketed down the hallways. I kept the smoke up the entire way I was going, and I knew that it was flooding the rest of the building in the way that it naturally expanded outwards. A doorway in the side of one hall jerked open as I flew past, and I saw the glowing silhouette of a curvaceous woman for a brief second, then I was gone. Two turns later, and I crashed through glass-paned entrance doors and into the night sky. The sun had fully set, and it was dark here. I could see the glow of the city to the… south?

  It didn’t matter, I knew where I was going, and that’s all that I needed. PHQ was my destination. I needed to get a response team up here as fast as possible, and it’d be easier to crash the building directly and identify myself than it would be to play automated phone switchboard system with a borrowed mobile from a stranger.

  One of my tentacles slid across my back in a distinctly unpleasant crawling sensation from my right side to my left, then the pair on each side merged and shivered in place as they morphed into a pair of insectile wings.

  I shot up and off into the night sky. Hopefully, nobody I was fleeing from could fly, although the back of my mind reminded me that flight was about the most common ability shared between any given number of parahumans.

  There was a flash of light behind and below me, but I didn’t look back. I was keeping my deafening up until I was well, well out of range of Mr. Small. I wasn’t willing to take that risk. All my focus was on speeding through the night sky as fast as possible and doing what I could to try and stabilize and repair the horrid state of Silver’s body.

  We… We made it, she sobbed. And we’re free!

  I told you they couldn’t keep us if we didn’t want to be there. How are you holding up?

  I–I’m alive. Better now than a minute or two ago, when it didn’t seem like I…we were going to make it.

  Have a little faith, Silver. I’m not going to let you die. Not if I have any say in the matter.

  I felt her hug my armored side in our shared space, and she buried her face into the soft gap between the armored plates along my ribs.

  Thank you, her voice was muffled. And…

  Hmm?

  I think you were right. I was terrified the entire time. I couldn’t get my thoughts together for long enough to react to what was going on, but… between the constant pain and the horrid sensations of your ability, it was exhilarating.

  I think you’re going to love flying more than anything, if I had to guess.

  She pulled her face back and seemed to be looking out the ‘windows.’

  It’s… It’s really nice, yeah.

  Better when we can see what’s going on, but I’m not wasting energy changing my vision around again, because the tank is on E and the pump light is flashing, too.

  Are we going to make it? What now?

  Yeah. We’re going to Protectorate HQ downtown and getting people sent out to where we were ASAP. Hopefully, they can get there in time, but we’re tapped out, so no more that we can do on our own.

  Where even…?

  Northeast municipal water treatment plant. Seems like it’s been out of commission since even my time. We were planning on getting it running again, because the piping in that part of the city was far more intact, but I don’t know. Something must have happened between then and now. Otherwise, we would have been swimming that entire time.

  A blinding flash of light shot past my right side. It hit my thermal vision hard, so whatever it was, it was really hot. My chest thumped and reverberated along with the flash.

  Ahh! Silver screamed.

  What the fuck, this just keeps getting better and better!

  I craned my neck back, and through the spots in my vision, I could see the form of someone in the distance behind me, but approaching quickly. Another flash seared my vision, a beam of some sort. I jerked my head away. Whoever it was, it wasn’t Mr. Small, I was very certain of that much. I lowered the deafening on my ears to a moderate dampening instead, but I didn’t hear anyone behind me. I poured on as much speed as I could, the muscles in my back protesting as I gasped for air. I blew jets of smoke out of my back and veered to one side, cutting east more than south. I kept the smoke going as hard as I could.

  I only needed to buy time and to try to make myself as hard to locate and hit as possible. Energy beams lancing across the sky were anything but subtle and would not go unnoticed by the PRT. There were likely phones in hands already, and fingers pushing alerts for the teams.

  Another blinding beam, followed by two more, and they were all close. I wasn’t sure if my smoke was working with their proximity, but I’d keep it up regardless. There wasn’t any beach on the north shore of the bay, just dark, jagged rocks and the blinking lights of warning buoys. I jetted out over the water and banked hard, cutting southwest and toward the downtown area. I was going to lose distance on my pursuer doing so, but hopefully the maneuver would throw off their aim. They weren’t firing often, at least.

  I was a few hundred yards out from the shoreline and beaches, and closing extremely quickly. Dropping my altitude as I went, maybe three hundred feet up, or in that area.

  Another flash of light lit up the sky from behind, and this time, I could hear a peal of thunder as much as I could feel it. But my vision blurred and my body went into a throbbing, pulsating numbness. We’d been hit–

  Fire. I was on fire, in a big way.

  I couldn’t feel it, and that was the scary part, but the wind resistance of Silver’s hair suddenly evaporated, and I could vaguely taste the smell of burnt meat. My vision was mostly blinded when I tried to look at myself. I was pretty sure we were all but fully ablaze, the wind battering the flames and keeping them away from my face and head. We started to drift to one side and pitch downwards into a ballistic trajectory.

  Fuck. Fuck, my wings!

  The surface of the water was rushing up at me; seconds remaining. My right arm was still immobilized. I brought my left elbow up in front of my face and buried my fingers into the flesh of my right shoulder. I pressed my head as hard against the crook of my arm as I could. I shoved a concept into my power as hard as I could.

  Survive.

  In the space inside our head, I coiled my entire body around Silver reflexively, until she was a tiny slip of a girl buried in my bulk like a sliver under skin.

  The flesh of my arm and my face warped and melded; the world went dark. The remains of my wings snapped their carapace and wrapped around my upper torso and head.

  A moment later, a collision. It felt like I body-slammed head and chest first into concrete. Like I’d dived straight off a roof onto a street. I didn’t feel it happen through my nerves, but through my center of mass jerking upward as parts of my lower body tore free. I bounced. Once, twice, then the third time I hit, I was spun, then sank.

  Cold water swallowed me, filling my empty spaces. Air fled in streams from the smoke-ports along my back. The dark ocean clutched my heart.