The woman with the purple fire was either inside or leaving the other end of the house. And as for Caryatid—

I flew up, and much like the woman with the purple fire had divided her attention between me and the window, I was left to divide my attention between laser beams flicking through the sky and a barrage of wildly aimed white spark-balls that were each surrounded by nimbuses of electricity, as they conducted to nearby rain. A red flare jumped up from near a fence that one of Teacher’s goons was using for cover, and I gave it a wide berth. It detonated like a firework.

I chanced a glance down, and I saw Caryatid outside, slumped over on the ground. I had to help her.

At the same time, the others were being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Outnumbered ten to one, with the ten being armed. Withdrawal leaped from one ancient tree to the roof of a house so prefabricated it looked like a dollhouse. His stilt-feet skidded across the roof, cutting and dislodging shingles, followed a moment after by a raking of a thin blue laser beam and a few haphazard shots of brilliant white sparks, like the weapon of the guy I’d just taken down.

I used my aura, primarily to distract. Heads turned, shots were altered last-second.

Those guns seemed to be firing at very steady intervals, roughly one shot every second and a half, and they didn’t run out of ammunition. Where they hit a target, they crackled outward, arcs lancing out to the nearest conductive target. It was one of these shots that hit the ground beneath Withdrawal’s stilt-legs, then arced up to shock the metal there.

Once I recognized that there was a pattern, I could adjust. Earlier, I’d had to dismiss instinct. Here, old sparring matches against my extended family came into play. There had been brief skirmishes against thugs who were willing to pull a real gun on a teenage girl in costume, and even an intense skirmish against Fenja had its relevance. As I’d moved in time with her giant-sized weapon’s swipes, I flew in general circles while I found the cadence here and they divided themselves by focus. Three people who had turned my way had those guns. Two of them were firing almost together, one firing out of sync with them, their spark-gun being bigger. A fourth had a laser gun, like the one that had produced the blue laser.

Two shots, change direction by going to their flank, change direction again to account for the adjustment of the third man, going up. The laser gun glowed blue as it charged up for the next shot.