“Get to her. Try and get her to change, but carry her back to Bluestocking somehow. Hug the wall, the guy making cutting lines is above!”

He looked relieved to have a job.

“I can do above,” Birdbrain said. “Give me a second, need to adjust.”

Foil, back still to the ground, gun in front of her, let go of her weapon to indicate a direction. Birdbrain nodded.

We had our reinforcements. I could hear Damsel using her blasts nearby, and wished she was here.

Moose drew nearer. I saw the lines around me disappear, the guillotine fizzling out, and realized what was imminent. A sudden lunge, the mech twisting, leaning hard on me to simultaneously push me down and use me as a bracing point to go for Moose, backhanding him.

I was ready for it. I dropped everything, losing the Wretch, the forcefield, and letting the mech fall instead of lean on me. The backhand lost its leverage, and Moose was able to bring his hands around and put his hands out in anticipation of the attack. The sides of the gauntlets, not the palms or fists.

The mech struck him, and Moose was sent stumbling backward but not so far back that he collided with the fence of glowing lines. The points where the hands met his gauntlets, however, bent inward, metal fingers bending and crumpling.

Moose shifted his hand from ‘chop’ to a fist, not punching, but simply pointing. The crumpled parts became craters. He pushed, to follow-up, and the shockwave that followed saw the mech toppling. I hurried to do my best to guide its fall.

The axis where four arms extended out hit the ground. The landing was hard enough to jostle everyone and everything nearby. Rain, trapped with no less than six of the glowing lines criss-crossing in a loose circle around him, nearly stumbled into one of them.

“He’ll try to fuck with you, Precipice is who he really wants!” I told Moose. “Careful of more lines!”

“Fuck,” was the response.

But he didn’t stop, as he recovered and ran, now crouching, in Rain’s direction.

Meanwhile, I had to deal with the fact that the mech no longer needed arms or hands on the ground to brace itself. With two big arms and two small ones, the center-mass was off. Something I’d always had to pay attention to when learning how to throw or move big things with my power.

An image flashed into my mind, of Uncle Neil giving me field instruction, while parents stood by, arms folded.

It hurt. The regret, the full and total knowledge that I hadn’t told her about my forcefield and she’d gotten hurt because of it. I didn’t want to call it the Wretch in this context, because that felt like it was deflecting blame to the reckless and wild consciousness at the other end of my power.