The beam cut into Ophion, and it did damage, this time. Its head was like chewed gum with spikes and metal contorting its shape, and that gum split and burned. Less than I would have liked, but I was carving into him. The gun shuddered, and the damage I’d fixed and pinched together was pulling further apart now. Handholds became gouges and furrows as I repositioned hands to hold onto the weapon.

Situating myself on the ground meant the ground provided a bit of security, one extra point of contact.

Ophion produced a fence of the pencil-thin black spikes, which absorbed some of the laser. The beam cut through them, but by the time I was through the one portion, a second row appeared. Veiled behind the row of protrusions, he produced a single black spike next to himself. I could only see it because of the limited night vision Kenzie’s tech provided me.

“Shit!” I heard a cape nearby call out.

“What?” someone else asked.

I was gritting my teeth, focusing too much on keeping the beam steady. I was aware I was burning through battery.

Tristan’s red motes solidified, forming another leaning tower of abstract ruined building. A second building emerged from within, then a third, ramming into the fence and knocking down a portion of it.

A nearby cape hurled something. An explosion of wood and stone bowled over the fences Tristan had rammed.

“Shoot it!” the first cape I’d heard called out.

“Shoot what!?”

“He’s got something! At the top of the spike!”

I flew forward, bringing the gun with me. Toward the horrifying Titan, toward the fallen and broken needle-like spikes that could alter a person on a fundamental level, and turn them into something grosser and bigger than a Titan.

I saw it. At the top of that center spike, traced in the gold outline that Kenzie’s tech provided me, a nugget of something, swelling.

I aimed, and I fired at it.

Yeah, sure enough, the gun wasn’t currently equipped to handle the vibration of its internals with the damage to its externals. Cracks split wider, claw marks opened up, and parts of it began to rattle.

My adjustments to keep hold of the weapon cost me accuracy, and I ended up trying to just take out the base of the spike, toppling it, because I could at least get the left-right aiming down while fucking up the up-down accuracy. Hitting the very tip required both.

I tried to get to a position where I could fire without exposing my flank to any of the insanity beams from the Stranger Titan. That took time, and the time ended up costing us. The nugget fell.

More spikes found their way to that nugget, suspending it where it was. The swelling intensified.

A part of someone’s body, still dripping blood. It might have been a foot.