“Side doors,” Capricorn said. “We checked all the rooms we could open as we passed, but we didn’t scout thoroughly for hiding places.”

“Tandem. Take Blatherskite and Tailgate, scout the way back, check the rooms more thoroughly, bring the wounded with you, find a spot to hunker down.”

“I can fight,” Blather said. Young kid, mask that covered cheeks and forehead, with some decoration around the eyes and a brightly colored lipstick. Wide-eyed and flinching with every nearby impact and loud sound. “You need us.”

“We need to not worry about the wounded,” Gong said. The dull impacts of tinker guns striking concrete grew coordinated and numerous enough to drown him out. I could see the wall that was taking the brunt of the attack. Each shot seemed to morph it, carving out a shallow indent that spread the material around it out. The combined hail of the power was enough to stretch the wall tall and thin. Gong was annoyed enough at the distraction—at the distraction and maybe just how it seemed to affect the kids in his squad who weren’t doing so hot. Blatherskite was feeling everything and Tailgate was stiff-chinned and asborbing nothing, staring off into space.

Gong slapped his hands together, and a shockwave rippled harmlessly past us, tracing a flat, long oval around us and our cover. The sound of incoming projectiles softened, then stopped. I peeked and saw the shockwave slowing as it moved, and slowing bullets and bolts of energy, a few chunky containers that might have been explosives, and some of our allies’ stuff as well. Someone in one of the concrete cubicles near the one we were hunkered down in was firing shotgun sprays of their power into Gong’s shockwave, filling it with what looked like two-armed tadpoles the size of my fist. They clawed blindly at the air, tails whipping around violently, and their screeches were high-pitched, feral, and muffled, as the shockwave absorbed even the sound.

Blather cringed at even those sounds, despite the fact they were friendly. No respite, even as the sound of the incoming attack more or less stopped.

Gong did about as tight and vicious a little spin-move as I’d ever seen anyone do, spinning on the spot and slapping at something mid-air. Wind rushed past all of us, and the assembled projectiles launched as a volley, flying out toward one of the entrances.

The crash was loud. I flinched, and I was used to the chaos of battlefields. Gong, meanwhile, landed on hands and knees, like something had been taken out of him. Big guy, heavyset but not tall, wrapped in armor in the Advance Guard style. The ‘gong’ motif was in diamond-shaped plates at key positions around his body.

Two seconds passed, punctuated by the sounds of other ongoing struggles nearby, but devoid of any of the sounds of the offense from that one direction.