I flew to the far side of the clearing, which also happened to have some of the thickest gatherings of people. They had been citizen laborers, gathering to make their displeasure known to the construction groups. They’d been facing the building until the incident, they’d backed up, and there were places where the presence of buildings and parked vehicles made it so they had no place to retreat, leaving them now packed together, shoulder to shoulder, front to back, jostling.

I’d helped to evacuate before. I had attended the Leviathan attack on my hometown. I had been around for the majority of the Slaughterhouse Nine crisis. I’d participated in other, minor incidents, helping with fires and storms, though those had mostly involved helping the elderly and standing around.

The truism was that in a disaster, people were their own worst enemies.

Never this bad.

I’d never seen or imagined a situation where people would do the opposite of evacuating, throwing themselves headlong into the hazard. They thought the people in the center of the clearing were getting powers, and people were breaking away from the crowd at the clearing’s edge to run toward the affected individuals.

Crystal created a wall to block off a street as she passed it. She wouldn’t be able to keep it up as she got further away, but it bought time for others to get there.

She raked a laser across the road, a bright and noticeable distraction, to give people pause.

I dropped to the street, using a pulse of my aura to get people’s attention. Some stopped to look, while others ducked low, as if instinct drove them to shy away from the perceived threat.

“Run!” I shouted, using my aura to play up my words. “Other way!”

I saw eyes widen, and turned to look. A man had opened his mouth, and had something that looked almost as tall and thick as a telephone pole spearing skyward from his mouth. Blood streamed from the sides of his mouth, his jaw clearly dislocated, and more fluids painted the length of the pole as it continued to rise. It reached its maximum height, and then forked, the upper half splitting out into two equally thick portions, a giant ‘Y’ shape. Each branch then forked into two, and forked into two again.

“Go,” I said, sparing only a momentary glance for the people I’d been stopping. I saw them start to run away.

The man reached up, his fingers dragging along the blood-slick shaft of the trunk of the fractal tree he had vomited up. Each movement of his hands was slower and weaker than the last.

I flew toward him, to do what I could to help, even though I wasn’t sure what that could possibly be.