I flew back another ten or twenty feet, feeling a horrible kind of sadness welling in my upper chest, to the point it hurt to breathe.

Damsel had been planning something, and as I retreated, she lunged forward. She created a ball of power in one claw, and a lateral blast in the other, as if to push the ball out my way. The ball unfurled, traveling a surprisingly long distance.

If I hadn’t been wary, that might have grazed me.

My heart sank further, and I floated further back, staying relatively low to the ground.

I couldn’t get distracted. If nothing else, I had grown up around heroes. From the day I’d first started playing at being a hero, my parents had both been giving me tips, using some to manipulate me into doing homework or chores, because didn’t a good hero need to be smart? If a heroine wouldn’t keep her room clean, how could she keep a city free of crime? Tell that to Crystal.

They’d hammered in situational awareness, a need to stay in control.

I couldn’t come here, looking to keep power uses down and keep control over things, then turn around and use the full capacity of my strength on these guys. I couldn’t provoke them or risk provoking them.

I tried to tell myself that if I was at least getting them to stand down in this moment, if they were standing there laughing at me, at least they weren’t using powers and threatening everything.

Backwoods was still periodically using his power, lobbing stakes of wood that exploded into multi-pronged outgrowths of wooden spikes. Each time he pulled one from his shoulder, another grew out.

I saw Gibbet and Hookline huddled together, his hand at her waist, their hips touching, his head bent down to talk to her, while he kept one eye on me. His hook…

I saw the line of it trailing down to the ground, and the slack seemed to run beneath cars.

He saw me looking. The hook had been creeping in my general direction, snaking between cars. It didn’t have to travel far, and it was whip-fast as it rose up toward me.

I put my foot up to give me a chance of kicking it or deflecting it if I needed to, while flying in another way. It wasn’t necessary, and I managed to avoid it.

I hadn’t used my forcefield on going through the portal because I hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone on either side of the heavily guarded hole in reality, and I hadn’t wanted to damage the architecture of the portal itself. Now I acutely felt the lack.

I looked down at the caricature, which was crash landing after another aborted flight attempt.