Tempera took an offered first aid kit, popping it open, grabbing things from within. Victoria focused on applying pressure, her eyes going from the wound to the scene around them.

“Not a good day for any of us,” Tempera said, looking over her shoulder, before she got to work.

But you’re still trying.

We’re still trying?

⊙

The cracks spread, finding weak point after weak point, spreading out from there. Places powers had cut too deep. Portals. Parahumans.

Where enough cracks spread, chunks simply… fell away.

Is this it, then? We should have run away?

Should I have let myself be shot?

Or would it have been any one of these other things and people, pushed to the edge? If I’d taken that bullet, would those people I can see now watch that video of my execution, push things further, find another breaking point?

She watched cracks spread further.

The cracks found their next launching off point. A woman with awareness extending everywhere. Each line of awareness was a weak point, like lines scored into rock before that rock was cracked. The cracks stretched easily along those efficient lines.

The woman in the suit, now locked in place, caught by her own well of power.

Because she’s her own blind spot, like Withdrawal said, much as any of us are blind to our own selves.

She was too interconnected. Her power tied to too many things too constantly, and that power formed bridges. Connected everything, in a way.

There were others, here and there. Others who were consumed by that power, twisted by it. Writ large. Some connected things further.

The city fell away and where it didn’t, it was because of people like herself, like the distant Kronos Titan, the new Titan borne of the woman in the suit. Of distant others who were too weak at just the wrong time.

⊙

Fume Hood, a Critical Moment, Now

He communicated with her.

[Respond?]

Her reply was inarticulate. Almost, she was ready to give up fighting, to consider her job done. She’d limited some of the damage and spared some of the lives.

[Help] was the second attempt from the distant voice.

This was hell. Her hell. It had to be everyone’s hell. For all her life, she had fought so hard and made so little progress, everything only evident in retrospect.

This was that, with too much on the line. She wasn’t nearly as strong as some or even most of the others that were emerging to stand tall, and she was already so very tired, so very weary of the world and her place in it.

It had been minutes.

He was asking for her to hold onto focus over days, if not weeks, months. He asked knowing how hard this was, because he had been enduring it.