“She decides the future outcome she wants, her power tells her how to get there, and she can do it in the blink of an eye. So! We need Teacher dead, defeated, or disabled,” Imp said. “We need to deal with his cronies. Bonus points if Teacher is disabled and at our mercy. There’s stuff we want to ask and do.”

“We need to save the heroes. As many people as we can,” I said. “Save people in the city from the fallout of what Teacher wants to do.”

“No,” Sveta said. “Those are important, but there’s another important question. Can we even trust you?”

“It doesn’t matter if you do.”

“The way here wasn’t as hard as it was in other parts of the facility,” Sveta said. “This feels like a setup.”

“It is set up, but not as you imagine,” Contessa said. “I was resisting the influence of powers, maintaining a thought-loop. He wanted to keep me close enough to keep an eye on me and regularly make his attempts at controlling me, but not so close that I could disrupt everything if I broke the loop myself. Well before I could reach him, he’ll have Custodian activate failsafes in this section of the facility, something I can’t do anything to prevent, only mitigate. He’ll use the delay to pull the trigger on his plan, disable my power in the process, and claim a complete and total victory.”

“Uh,” Imp said.

“You were one hundred percent sure we’d win, Imp?” Swansong asked, from the back.

“You tempted fate,” Juliette said. “Tsk tsk. Samuel would be so disappointed in you.”

“What the fuck?” Imp asked.

“There are options. We can work within the confines of that reality if we move quickly and if you’re decisive as a group.”

“Why are we walking briskly, then?” Imp asked. “If they’re going to, what, set this entire place on fire? Blow it up?”

“Running would guarantee that many of us would die, because of where we would be when the Custodian acts. At this pace we’ll be positioned so we survive, very dusty, some of us scraped up, but only superficially.”

“How blind are you?” Sveta asked.

“Blind?” Precipice asked, twisting around.

“Remember the briefing, we talked about assets Teacher might have? She was one.”

“And we were supposed to let Valkyrie handle her if we could. Run otherwise.”

“Because she’s blind around very powerful capes, or near certain effects, like messy portals, strong tinker devices, Endbringers, and Scion. When the Irregulars attacked Cauldron, she was a big thing we had to plan around.”

“Yes. Unfortunate.”

“We weren’t positive you weren’t behind Scion. Objectively, looking Cauldron’s operations from the outside, you were outright evil and you seemed to be doing what Teacher is doing now.”