In a dormitory room two stories above us that had been sliced in half, one person stood at the ruined border, a person a few steps behind him. They handed him a tinker gun, which he immediately started using. The person behind him had a gun a moment later—a relay line like firemen passing along buckets, but kind of the opposite, because they were laying down fire.

They weren’t alone. The evacuation chutes were acting like slides for people to drop down to the floor we were on, and there were multiple points like the dormitory room, where a single person with a tinker gun became two, which became three, then four, until they were shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall, using up the available space. A shitton of resources were being dumped on us, a lot of guns aimed our way.

I flew up, to get above the ambient dust cloud and assess the situation.

They weren’t accurate, which—

I winced as the Wretch blocked a shot that had come at me from behind. Sparks flew from the impact, and sizzled audibly as they landed on my costume, refusing to go out. I had to use my armguard to scrape them off, while swiftly descending into the dust again, crook of my elbow over my lower face.

For the most part, they weren’t accurate. Not accurate in a special way.

I was working under the impression that Teacher had gone with the tinker guns because of a weird sort of practicality. Creating two hundred tinkers and have them each make their own guns was more discreet than acquiring two hundred normal guns of any quality, when the options were salvage from Bet, Cheit, or Shin. Side benefit: there was more chance that a tinker gun of a particular variety or style might work against a parahuman attacker. If he were to grab two hundred ordinary assault rifles and the first one didn’t work against an attacker, then there was a good chance the next one hundred and ninety-nine wouldn’t either.

Drawback? They were tinkers who were shooting. People who knew how to use the specialized guns, but who didn’t have any thinker tricks, enhanced vision in the dark, or added accuracy. With that in mind, it was the muzzle flashes that didn’t look like tinker guns that worried me.

There was a lot to unpack, thinking about it. Could he have created one hundred tinkers and then one hundred people with powers that made them better gunmen, to partner with them? Probably. Why not, then? Because he wanted to bog us down. He was willing to kill, but time and delay were more important from his perspective.

And it was probably working.