It didn’t seem to give her pause. She flew forward, no doubt straight into the convoluted trap that Teacher would have planned out weeks before.

I took flight, past flames and toward blue motes and lines, into that selfsame snare.

Gleaming 9.11

I’d fought Lung before. He was the very first bullet point in a handful, when it came to the fact that some people really hated emotion powers. Which was fair—I still felt something small twist up inside me when I even thought about Snag’s feeling-of-loss attacks. But Lung was part of the handful I’d fought where I could input fear and get anger. Dean had run into the same thing, with emotions other than fear returning the same output.

Some people, especially those of a more feral stripe, just processed things in a different way. The upside was the tactical advantage in it, if I could adjust my expectations fast enough.

The downside was that I had to make that adjustment. Most of my costumed fighting experience was that my enemies would hesitate, get sloppy, or back off, but Lung, like Bitch, like the cooler but still dangerous Krieg or the seemingly unflappable Victor who would still act differently when under the influence of my power, attacking faster and more recklessly. They were the people who were angry at the world, or those with the natural predisposition to fight rather than fly.

It meant I had his attention. Even before I activated my aura, it still meant he was keeping an eye on me, because he had experienced it before. Actually using my aura helped, provoking him on an emotional level.

With just a little more provocation coming from the hot purple apocalypse my aura was spreading across our shared battlefield.

I flew hard, chased by a stuttering spear of purple flame and a staccato, rolling explosion of fire where my emotion aura pulsed out and caught fire. The aura pushed out, and the fires that caught traced in that direction, before flowing back in and toward me, stopping when the pulse ended. That was what I assumed was responsible for the rolling part of the wall of explosions.

There was a crashing sound. Goddess was dealing with the mooks, breaking the earth and then hurling that broken ground at them from one direction, while throwing other debris at them from another. They were forced to run for cover. Into the same building as Monokeros and Lookout.

I started to fly to pursue.

“No!” Byron shouted, barely audible given the distance and the hellscape of flame below. “Only… deal with Lung! You! I can’t!”

I wanted to argue. Lung wasn’t dealt with. Not by someone like me. Byron and Tristan were a better answer than a brute like me.

I stopped myself. Byron was already making his way inside.

I at least knew Lung.