Fighting you every step of the way for as long as I did conditioned me to be brutish. Trying to intimidate Nazis and criminals made me brutish.

I kept two of the longer stingers, with the ragged guts and organs still clinging to the base ends.

Skewered two more, used the skewering to reposition them, and removed their skewers, so I had four. Each was as long as my normal, non-forcefield arm, and dripped a constant quantity of clear fluid. I could smell it, astringent.

It made me think of Crawler’s acid, which made me think of the acid burn at my hairline. Made me think of Amy, and that damned scene Engel had inflicted on me.

I put the feelings to rest, and tore through the rest of the wasp-worms between myself and Ophion. More wasp-worms were flying up around him, a barrier or shield. He was the hive they protected.

I drove the stingers in as deep as they would go, aiming for the spot where the chewed-gum mass of his upper body met the lower body. Flesh seared visibly around the penetration points. Flying up, I dragged hands and fingernails through the skin. Flesh peeled back, pulling away from surface tension alone, but only revealed more layers of the chewing gum, tumor-like mass.

It was a question of small improvements in efficiency. Before, ungainly, arms set further apart, it was better to deliver heavier hits, recover, deliver those hits again. Now I grabbed, instead.

Grab and tear. Slice with fingernails and separate what was sliced. Dig.

With only the wet sounds of flesh sliding against flesh filling my ears, I had no good cues to tell when he reacted. Only guesswork. Guesswork to dodge a cluster of his mutation-spikes, that were black against a backdrop of gray, dirtied snow and black, unlit landscape.

I flew away, and was in the midst of flying when a spike clipped me. Forcefield down, momentum broken.

I had a glimpse of spikes, where powers flashed on another battlefield. People fending off the Nemean Titan. I could imagine it was a dozen or two dozen new spikes a second, stabbing upward and inward, with himself as the spike’s fruitless, uncaring target.

I flew in a straight line, because the best impression Kenzie’s night vision tech was giving me suggested a morass of a dozen spikes all coming in different directions—criss crossing, straight up, from nearby buildings. Distance from any source of the bio-alteration spikes was more important than any evasive action—it barely felt like he was aiming. The outlining that her tech gave me was delayed by a second, and these things took about that long to get to me. Less like it helped, and more like it taunted me, notifying me of the near-misses.

My forcefield returned, and I was in the midst of breathing a sigh of relief when I felt the jarring crash of another spike striking home, a foot from me, pointed dead-on at my heart. I twisted in the air as the broken point continued to thrust forward, and it scraped the ornament at the top of my breastplate, damaging it.