Others used powers, they killed his children, and they tried to stall things.

But the paper wall broke down, dissolving into a million sheets that filled the air. He had a glimpse of the woman who had created it, being taken to pieces to an extent where she already looked like a vaguely person-shaped stack of beef cubes with bones here and there.

Darkness boiled out of the tunnel that Valkyrie was residing within. It leaked out as a heavy fog.

The sound of Swansong using her power caught his attention, as the fog swelled from ankle height to knee height, even with the wide surface area.

It blocked their view of his children, but it blocked his children from seeing too.

He saw them leap, hopping up until they were out of the cloud of dark, then leap again once they hit solid ground, for whatever they’d seen. Most got out of the way.

Swansong was using her power despite the damage it did to her, and she was doing it for no apparent reason, except to hold a bit of her darkness in her hand.

Spawner narrowed a half-dozen eyes.

“Darkness is my ally,” she said.

No, Bradley thought, irrationally annoyed. That isn’t a good line!

Be more afraid, Ned thought.

He leaped. She used her power, hopping up onto a storage crate as he’d done earlier, landing on her shins rather than use her injured foot to bear her weight.

He approached, running through the waist-deep darkness, and he saw her surreptitiously place something on the container. Before he could close the gap and reach her, she threw herself sideways, into the darkness ten feet below the top of the storage container. Her power went silent as she was submerged.

He tossed one of his children onto the top of the storage container she had occupied, with a simple instinctive command programmed into it. To seize whatever was there, to jostle, disturb. If he gave a command, it was to bring the thing to him. Otherwise, it was to carry it away.

It found nothing.

Leister pole-vaulted himself into the air and extended his trident, making it long and wide, before raking it across the floor. When he pulled it up out of the pitch black fog, it was alongside body parts and Spawner’s children. The body parts belonged to someone who had been devoured earlier.

He visited the same spot she’d occupied, in part to get her scent. He watched as she emerged, approaching Captain Claw, as if he wasn’t a consideration. Her back was to him, and she didn’t even glance his way. Claw fought with his hands in his pockets, a phantom image of something large and bestial looming over his upper body and head, clawing and snapping at Swansong and destroying the area around her whenever it missed. When her power destroyed a part of it, it was quick to be replaced.