Hollow words, to give my ‘all’. Hopeless words.

I’d needed this. I’d needed to be able to do this on some level. And I hadn’t been able to. It scared the shit out of me.

Water sprayed, cutting through the smoke, as cold as the air was hot. With that, there was a moment where others could see Lung, and Lung could see them.

Everything told me to run, that we had to evacuate.

Goddess—if the stories about her were to be believed, if the refugees from her world were telling the truth, then her world would suffer for her return. I couldn’t really buy it, the long list of ifs, but it was the most critical way of parsing things.

If Teacher won, if we couldn’t beat Lung and keep Teacher from getting what he wanted, then none of the worlds would be okay.

We couldn’t run.

Water splashed Lung, and water became stone. I flew at him, catching a large piece of rubble on the way. My aim was to fly by him, to smack him with two or three hundred pounds of concrete. Then I saw the blade of silver carving its way through the air, leaving a trail behind it, as it left its mark on smoke particles, making them more prone to splitting.

It caught Lung across the belly, and I closed in, ready to deliver the final blow.

Lung leaped up, wings flapping.

Disappearing into the smoke and darkness.

I flew after him.

By the time I found him, the mark on his stomach was gone. He cast flame down toward the ground, and this time there was no reason for the Pharmacist to extinguish it.

To distract him, I flew at him. I used my aura, and it touched the purple fire on the ground. Where Lung’s fire extended down, purple fire raced back up, cascading up the trails left behind each blast, climbing higher, higher, expanding as I fed it with my aura, until he had to stop for a moment to let it all dissipate.

Then I had his focus. Two spears and one stalagmite of rock floated in the air beside me, gripped by invisible hands. One was gripped so tight it was going to break in the middle.

The others couldn’t help me here. We’d driven him to the air where only a few people could challenge him.

We. It was a corny thing, too belated when Byron had ducked inside, used his power from a window, probably. When Rain had been on the periphery, firing mostly blind into smoke and fire, and when Goddess had very understandably been caught up with the trials of directing an unruly group of prisoners.

But we’d been stronger as a group. We were too fractured.