The artillery line was a number of our stronger attackers who couldn’t really navigate the battlefield itself. At one side, the side she’d just tried to save from being axed, there was an amorphous cloud that people were delivering their attacks to. A matching cloud was very close to Titan Eve, and produced some kind of nanotech replication of every strike and power effect, calculated and adapted to in the fly.

At the other end of the line, capes with short ranged abilities were getting help from Gunnery Anne, one of Advance Guard’s backline capes, who handled the training of their rookies. She added range to all abilities, turning strikers into blasters. Some master minions even translated, rust spiders with fifty twitching, spindly limbs getting a brief touch from her before leaping hundreds of feet to where Titan Skadi was embroiled with the long glowing tendrils of a shaker effect. They offered a constant barrage of fire, point blank attacks extending for hundreds of feet to scour and carve into Oberon’s back and sides.

Had been getting help from Gunnery Anne. Had added range to all abilities. Had translated. Had offered a constant barrage.

Oberon hadn’t even had to turn his head to look. A leap with a backflip, and hooved feet struck road. The ones who weren’t beneath the hooves were still torn up into froth, bodies torn up as hooves dug deep into the road’s surface, churning up a violent mess of snow, ice, cracked asphalt and gravel-filled subgrade.

Out of position, Hecatomb reached the spot two seconds too late. Struck at the hoof and ankle, and was left to stand there amid ruined bodies as Oberon leaped back.

It took seconds. One bad call, by a cape who had been fighting for forty minutes with zero room for error. Hecatomb was too frontline, the tinker Ex Nihilo was too much of a backline cape. They didn’t know each other, didn’t speak the same languages, probably, and hadn’t been positioned to know where each other were.

I wanted to tell her it was okay. That she shouldn’t take it to heart. I could have given her a hug, when she had been working to be a hero in a strange world where she knew nobody and nothing, and that heroism had come down to this. One mistake she would carry with her for the rest of her life.