I stopped falling and came to hover in the air. I let out a breath I’d been holding, in a single, “bluh,” followed by panting breaths.

It was quieter down here. Calmer. Just… cold air washing in from above, the whistles and hisses of wind, and the dull impacts of distant fighting.

My phone buzzed.

I picked it up, pressing it to my ear, and I heard only static.

I flew up, and the flying was a struggle.

Static became words. “—evac.”

“Say again?” I talked into the phone. I flew back and up, away from the Titans.

“Get out, Antares. You’re done. People are evacuated, Titan Eve has moved on, and the reinforcing group is there. We don’t expect or want you fighting through the initial encounter and the second shift.”

Fuck, my foot hurt. I hoped I hadn’t broken bones.

I floated up further. Legend wasn’t that far away. I could see him in the air, drifting slightly, the wound with loose, curving lasers unspooling out from his upper body and bleeding out in white and blue that contrasted with the dark sky. He was slowly knitting himself together. As more of his face formed into human features, I saw him grimace in pain.

In the course of one fight, the Titans had leveled a section of the city. Had this area of city been a neighborhood, one team like the Rooftop Champs could have made it a long-term goal to protect it. On Earth Bet, it would have been a town. Twenty, thirty thousand people might have lived here. Decayed with gases, trampled, damaged, or lost in the cracks in reality.

“Got it,” I said into the phone.

“Thank you for your hard work.”

I let the phone drop back to my hip. I floated up and back, getting a wider view of the battle and the battlefield. Two Titans fighting in concert. Twenty heroes, with only a dozen actively engaged in this moment. Parian’s creation was deflated. The bodies had been carried away.

The Titans were healing, now. The damage being done didn’t quite make up for the speed at which they were recovering. Most of the damage had been done by Eve. By retreating, we’d given up on that incremental damage.

And I could see it. I got it. Yes, we could have won, with Parian’s power fully unleashed, and one Titan pinned down. We could have wiped out Oberon and there was even a chance that we would have disrupted every other Titan he was connected to. What happened to Titans Skadi and Auger if the Titan central to their network died? Maybe we could have discovered that.

But… then what? Would we have been in any shape to fight what came next?