When I mowed into them with a single burst of gunfire, they collapsed into one another, if they didn’t collapse forward.

Except Red had been shielded by the people between her and I, and I still had to deal with her. I saw the telltale splashes, and I got out of there.

I thought I got out of there. I went low, closer to the base of the building, hugging the wall to minimize the chance that someone would be able to catch me off guard.

I had the Wretch active, and that likely saved my life. Red’s industrial tool this time was a crane mount, spearing sky high and bringing cable and wrecking ball with it. That wrecking ball slammed into me and the wall I was hugging. The wall below them, that was holding their section of the roof up.

Putting me through concrete and brick, partially indoors. I narrowly avoided having the cabling of the wrecking ball catch me and pull me into the ground as the whole apparatus sank back into the earth, just as fluidly as it had emerged.

Red, it seemed, had hopped over onto a piston she was using as an elevator back toward the ground. More industrial tools were appearing to push broken concrete and dirt up against the walls, shoring them up as the building came to pieces.

I didn’t press the fight. It wasn’t a priority. Our goal was stopping Cradle, and Cradle wasn’t even here anymore.

The siege was ongoing now. The grenade shots shook the building and people were hurrying outside. The momentum barrier was a one-way screen for them to open fire.

I flew high, because low was hazardous as hell. Capricorn had used a water blast, and when that water hit the momentum barrier and stopped, he’d turned it to stone. Turning the enemy’s one-way fortification into something two-way. My dad peppered the outer edges of the stone ‘splash’ with grenades, still somehow firing them like he was using a railgun, and the chunks that flew up and over were raining down on the mercenaries.

But—there were fifteen of us, minus any injured I wasn’t aware of.

There were more than a hundred of them.

Just from the look of it, the grenade shots were coming from further back. Our team was steadily retreating.

An audible wet sound was my only clue that I was under attack. In any other place, I might have dismissed the sound, but I was too high up for something to sound so sharp and near. I changed direction, using the Wretch.

A geyser of vomit from the airborne Barfbat. Chugalug floated below, gas-filled trash bags buoying him. He was downwind and further down, which spared me the worst of the smell.

Barfbat spewed another geyser. Liquid and far too sustained for something from a human-sized package.