Most ‘action’ was to scramble out of the way of the chunks of roof that were breaking away from the split. Some stood their ground. Red was one, her machinery rising up in a barrier. A giant pincer seized my mother.

Mukade was another. Beyond deflecting and ‘catching’ the falling chunks of roof, his target was Foil. From the sides of his body and legs, the ‘centipedes’ ripped out. Minions, they were each a half-foot wide, two inches tall down the center, and tapered down to razor edges at the sides, each edge serrated with the angular ‘legs’ or saw-teeth. The heads of each centipede were more like goblets or open mouths with ill-fitting lids or muzzles, the mouths designed to spew acid and the covers to channel that acid down the length of centipede that followed after. The fluids were luminescent in the light and black in the dark.

Foil kicked at a piece of rubble to change the direction of her fall. Two centipedes lanced past her, tearing into armor panels and the remaining decorations of mine that she’d tucked into the side of her belt. She stabbed one, and jerked violently as it carried her up and back.

Down was met with resistance, slowed, made floaty. There was something with heat or temperature manipulation in there too, but I wasn’t dwelling on it. Up and away was faster, normal speed.

I flew to her, and my way was barred by a loop of centipede.

They fed into and through Mukade, their initial emergence or their passage through him giving them a speed that had to be in the order of a hundred miles an hour, at the very least, but the moment they weren’t being fed through, they became slower, just fifty or a hundred feet of razor edges and acid.

‘Just’.

Acid.

They were slower still while trying to return to their master to be fed through again. Foil using the centipede carried her out of the line of fire, past the rooftop and away from the initial shots from those who’d been quick enough to bring guns to hand and open fire while the centipedes lunged.

But now she was a good hundred feet in the air, the centipede not strong enough to hold her up on its own, so she sagged with every passing second. I tried to fly past, the Wretch active, and found the centipede before me was quick to react, to form S-bends that caught me and caught the Wretch. Like flying into a net or web. They wrapped around, caught, and flooded the surface of the Wretch with acid—

My aura did nothing, as I pushed out full strength. I had to dismiss the Wretch, instead, to slip through a gap, escaping. Acid splashed my boot and sent a shock of black horror through me.