They’d been able to abandon the ‘door’ because reinforcements had come. Bitter Pill was the first to make her way in, twice as tall as she had been but not twice as thick around, with limbs that flexed like they had rubber and not bone inside. Her mouth yawned open, froth flowing from the corner lowest to the ground, and her tongue lolled out, extended in length. She had a soldier in each hand, and she flexed her entire body to heave one up, then slam him into the nearest corner. The other she shoved face-first into the frozen dirt, with enough strength to leave a furrow behind.

As intimidating as the warped silhouette was, the sounds were mewling, soft moans, with some vibration behind them, as if from the lowest point of the throat.

“Careful!” I shouted. “Glowing lines kill!”

Being big as she was, her body wasn’t good at moving through Cradle’s mess of lines. She made it about halfway before she stumbled into one and lost her leg and part of her pelvis. She crashed to the ground and in the process lost a bit of her scalp.

Birdbrain, Moose, and two more of the local capes stopped in their tracks as they saw her fall.

A long arm that bent under the weight of its extremity found its way to the lab coat she wore, which barely extended below her ribcage with her altered form. Another medication dispenser. This one topped with what looked like a tumor with a mask shaped like a baby’s face on the front.

The head flipped back, and her stretched-out mouth was already wide open for another squirt from the Pez dispenser.

Moose was more careful. He tried backhanding one of the lines, stopping short of hitting it, and let the shockwave run past it. I could see where the shockwave that followed the movement disturbed the earth. It took a ‘v’ shape, as even that was parted.

I felt the mech I was wrestling shift in reaction to the vibration. Whatever the Harbinger was doing didn’t seem like enough.

I almost looked at Brandish as that happened, checking if she had been hurt worse by even the fact that there was movement in the air, jostling, and changing in position.

He was tall, too, and unlike Bitter Pill, he had the ‘powers gave me this physique’ build.

“Who needs help!?” Moose shouted.

“Carol—the woman—”

“Precipice,” I interrupted my dad. “Get to Precipice, Moose, help him get free of the cage. You!”

I indicated someone else from the group. A cape I didn’t recognize, who had an unkempt beard that extended below the line of his mask. He had a mean look to him, by design, by color, the way the metal armor he wore strapped in over coat and costume bottoms was as scuffed and battle-scarred as it was. But his eyes were wide and alarmed behind the mask.