The bubble popped. His body was freed and his body was utterly trapped. He’d infused power into every article of clothing he owned, sometimes years worth of power, and that power had come due. Every time he had passed on power to his helmet, it had shifted imperceptibly. To become something mythic, something to be proud of.

Now, however, it all came due at once.

His helmet was a crown, extending up and above him like a skyscraper, impossibly tall. He might have snapped into pieces, but other articles worked their way into it.

He’d called it a crystallization, once, and now the crystal crept over him.

There had been ten thousand times he’d snapped while in that bubble. Ten thousand times he’d broken from reality, broken from memory, from hope, from everything.

And in those moments, he’d glimpsed something greater. For longer, and longer, each time. Each effort a vain attempt by his collaborator, his agent, to forge a connection and reach out.

But that wasn’t how this worked. He didn’t get to have connections. That hadn’t been the unspoken bargain he’d apparently struck. He didn’t get the tools to better cut and cauterize wounds and save his son’s mother for nothing.

But it had tried, and as with the helmet and the rest of that crystallized effort, he felt it come due. Connections. Enough connections to the Nazi to pull him apart and draw the composite pieces into the crystallization. All were broken connections, reaching out to other broken things to find the most tenuous purchase, but if the crystal was machinery and the agent the power source, then the connection let him have a hand on the wheel.

It was enough to keep himself up, once he’d grown enough that it was ungainly.

The connection came, and the connection stayed.

He saw enough.

⊙

“You’re going to have to explain,” Victoria said, whispering. “Because if you can make any sense at all out of this…”

She hovered over a ledge, and that ledge overlooked the distant sight. A figure so tall his heads were in the clouds. The growth that extended up from the ‘head’ was fractal, geometric, crystal, but with veins instead of straight lines.

That growing extended to the legs, starting at the feet and working its way up. A skirt, a dress, a lower body that was a mountain. Limbs and body, all in the rough silhouette of a giant, a titan writ in a strike of white lightning that didn’t budge, flicker, readily change shape, nor stop.

“We mentioned it was a structural issue,” Harbinger Two said.

“Where to start?” Harbinger Three asked. “I’d start by outlining that you have an array. One connects to two connects to three—”

“No numbers,” Swansong growled.

“No numbers,” Victoria agreed.