Good. He tapped on his screen, adjusting the halo’s auto-targeting. Map to stress, draw up a three-dimensional map of wavelengths and patterns, adjust, adjust—

The screen showed what was a heat-map of the forcefield. Red where it was strongest, blue where it was ‘cold’, weak. He never liked that, because he liked to think of cold as proof of strength. Cold drink, cold weather.

He used all five fingertips to drag the targeting grid over to the map, then set the targeting paradigm. Aim for the blue.

As soon as he was close enough, the halo began firing arc-beams. The weapons screen to the left of Mischa’s head was a constant in his peripheral vision, lighting up with new icons as a new arc was mounted and released by the halo. His hand remained at the switch for targeting.

All targeting the cooler, weaker spots of the forcefield, that rippled so violently when the antigravity engines were so close.

The zoomed-in view of the parahuman’s face on the other side of the pyramid remained on the one screen. Their head hung, arms up, and the forcefield rippled even more aggressively than before, holes appearing here and there where it pulled apart.

He began working out an addendum to his targeting paradigm. Aiming for the people visible through the holes. He—

The craft shuddered, lights going out, monitors switching to red, heat levels rising, system damage, system failure—he flipped the switch and got to work, figuring out what had happened. He reset the display and saw—lasers everywhere. Saint’s ‘Victory I’ had its wings extended, shielding Mischa and the Yàngbǎn-supported squad from the worst of it.

Mischa had known he was risking an all-out attack from Legend while his targeting was diverted, but he had assumed it was a risk he could see coming. The forcefield pyramid would go down, Legend would fire, Mischa would throw the switch, and the halo would counter the incoming fire.

Except the pyramid was up, and the lasers were omnipresent. All silver beams with light blue nimbuses around them. Mischa zoomed in.

The pyramid was just that—a shape that extended up and over, in a pyramid shape that was breaking down a little under the Isaiah’s assault. Legend stood surrounded by teammates, hand extended down. A hole burned down through the platform—and the lasers projected down, turned at sharp angles, and struck at the attackers, Mischa’s Isaiah, and Saint’s Victory I.

Teacher’s soldiers glowed white where hit, as if they were metal and not flesh. That would be one of the powers, then. The ones at the front reached out to slap the lasers aside, creating distortions in the air that forced the rays back toward the bubble, or up into the atmosphere.