“Stay calm!” Withdrawal grunted out the words, between swings of his tinker weapon. It wasn’t meant for the task, and it was taking a beating. Big as it was, not every swing broke everything it hit.

Breakers triggered from disassociation. From mental illness, from deprivation of sleep or food, from a mind-body disconnect, or from the divide between normal trigger circumstance and reality, the paradoxical events. Brutes tended to trigger from being hurt, as I had. A breaker with brute sub-powers tended to trigger from wanting self-harm, or from harm that was all in one’s head. Attacks from imagined enemies could make a breaker with the subclass of striker or blaster. For a stranger, who tended to trigger from unwanted attention, the case in the textbooks had been an exhibitionist who had been caught, experiencing the mingled sexual thrill coinciding with the fear of imminent arrest, imminent loss of family, and imminent loss of career.

Breakers also came about from medicine or drugs that altered the mind-body state. Caryatid.

“It’s a tailor-made fight for us!” I called out. “Caryatid, this is a counterattack from a guy with thinkers at his disposal! People who know us! People who’ve used powers to study us and figure out what works best against us!”

“It’s working!” she said.

“Get through this second by second! If you can get through the stuff that’s this personal, you can get through anything!”

“What if I can’t? What if I can’t do this?”

“You’re doing it as we speak!”

She was about to say something, but another tide of syringes came our way from around the corner, in Withdrawal’s general direction. A second later, a shape hurtled in that same direction. Hurtled and stopped.

Precipice, now suspended in the air above a carpet of needles, using his power.

“Uh,” he said.

“Caryatid! The extinguisher!” I reached out my arms.

She went breaker and used the short lunge of her movement to toss the extinguisher at me. It took me both arms to catch.

“Incoming!” Precipice called out. He created a blade.

I used my strength to hurl the extinguisher, changing what I was aiming for in the last moment before release. It crashed through the thicket of needles between me and Precipice, hit the ground, and crashed through stuff there, not directly beneath him.

But it gave Withdrawal a spot to jump forward to, landing in a bare patch with just a bit of skid on the fluids and broken material that now carpeted the ground there. He caught Precipice, then sprung back the way he’d come.

A hulking form lunged into view, coming within a handspan of getting a grip on Precipice. Copper mask, partial armor, and a loincloth, and a body covered in oozing sores, blisters, and scabs. Copper chains wound around his arms, and swollen, infected hands gripped the hooks at the end of those chains.