I’d seen injuries like that in the re-enactments and recreations too.

It slowed her down, and bought our side time. Chris had the giants he hadn’t sent to deal with Titans in reserve, and two of those giants joined the fight now. The Goddess Giant and the Mother Giant. A tide of flesh, narrowly missing our back line here, forming into a loose hand shape as it reached for the Simurgh, and gripped telekinetically frozen air instead.

The Simurgh lifted a length of metal that might have been part of a crane, once. A second later, it was slapped down to the ground. The Goddess Giant, countering her.

We had time to regroup, to figure out what we were doing. Two giants fought the Simurgh, who remained where she was, wings in a loose ball-shape around her, air telekinetically held where it was to serve as a shield just past where the wings were, and a crowd of capes retreated, finding steadier ground that wasn’t in the literal shadow of the Simurgh and her wings.

I offered a hand to Byron. Sveta helped Rain. Cryptid moved closer to his giants, wearing a form wreathed in folds of too-thick skin, brutish and broad-shouldered, with a kilt-like wreath of cloth around his hips. He shouted out incoherent orders, hand indicating directions.

Damsel of Distress was launched into the air by someone’s power, and descended onto the bubble of hardened air, blasting through it with her blasts of twisted darkness, plunging at the Simurgh herself.

This is too easy. What’s the catch?

Wait—

She’d just used one piece of the Machine Army. The Simurgh had been holding two earlier. There was no outline, no indicator, even as I could see labels and markings elsewhere.

“Shit!” I swore, as I flew up, back, taking in the cloud of mist, trying to remain peripherally aware. There were labels marking the people who’d been caught in the midst of the cloud of disturbed earth. I kept track of them, mapped her approximate location, reached into a handhold to turn a dial, to make the laser fatter.

The beam cut through suspended ice and dust, burned it, and cleared something of a path. I tried to trace the Simurgh’s path back to where she had been.

I found and hit a drone, and fried it beneath the laser. Metal turned to orange-white slag. Orange-white slag turned black, then became dust, caught by the stiff winds that didn’t budge this snow and grit.

Every time we grab her arm, reach inside her sleeve, and find the card she’s holding, it turns out there’s more waiting.

I was feeling the pressure. The scream, the fact we needed to win here, and the path to a win was beating her. There was a saying that people sometimes brought up when the Simurgh was mentioned. Win the battle, lose the war.