“Don’t you fucking dare,” he growled.

“Sorry, sir,” Monsignor said, tipping his hat. “Respects.”

Auger raised his hand, a laser appeared, thin and bright, straight to the catwalk the others stood on.

“We’ll make a commotion,” Fing said. “Draw them after us. Best we can do. You know you’d do the same thing.”

The doors banged open, and Auger spun around. The laser pointed at the men in uniforms that were storming in. Not POLRI. These assholes were private military. Someone had really fucked up on their due diligence.

Someone pushed their way through the crowd.

A cape. Except not just a cape. The man had tech worked throughout his body. Metal that pulsed like a heart did, flesh that was rigid and doll-like, and things between. His body had glass domes on it, and brains floated in that glass, crowded in by the other tech and flesh.

The laser was only a sight. It, for lack of a better word, flowered, the flowering spiraling along its length, glowing red.

Roughly ten uniformed men in the laser’s path had a hole three feet across opened in their hips, bodies, and heads. Sparks floated in the air in the beam’s wake. The remains of the cyborg collapsed, a small fist-sized brain bouncing down metal catwalk stairs amid a splash of fluid.

Really didn’t do their fucking due diligence.

He ran for the stairs. Gunshots to his left made him look up at the catwalk, where the others had been.

They’d run for the door, and found guns waiting on the other side. Fing was missing part of his neck, and Slink had collapsed backward onto the catwalk railing, arms draped over it like a comic wrestler, blood dripping down her body and through the gaps in the catwalk.

That was supposed to be Auger’s escape route.

It was sparks, it’s been a few seconds. This should be flowers.

He focused his beam for two seconds, then fired at the wall, angling it upward. The beam widened, the power spiraled down its length, and this time it flowered, like petals unfolding.

Punching columns through reality. Except it wasn’t really punching anything through. He ran through the hole, holding his breath as he passed through the storm of petals that filled it. Those petals and this pollen would stop being petals and pollen in time, though the hole would remain. If he breathed it in, he would have concrete dust, bedrock, and pieces of the ‘water treatment’ plant inside his lungs.

People had already reached the bottom of his tunnel, and they shouted. They pointed guns at him.

He had nowhere to run.

After flowers is desolation.

After his last trip into desolation, he’d made the geiger counter go crazy.

Still, it was better than being shot.

He focused his power into himself.

The beam’s power ripped through him, and disconnected him from his current reality. A trick he’d had to teach himself after too many close calls. A trick he considered his power giving him a favor for being such a helpful power-user. As far as the others were concerned, he detonated, exploding on the spot.