The foot became more, expanding, branching out, swelling, with flesh ballooning out like an explosion had gone off within it, but then tearing, revealing red meat instead of the smoke and fire residual to an actual explosion.

I focused the beam at center mass, tried to cut it away from the spikes that impaled it.

Arms reached out blindly from the mass, and one of the hands found the toppled black spikes. Again, they seemed to multiply the growth rate.

A face, mouth yawning wide. More arms, more flesh, breasts, a veiny tube of flesh that was attached to the mass at both ends, pulling free to reveal a tooth-encrusted cockhead. Hair—

Bringing me to the cusp of that same flashback I’d just weathered. I kept my aiming on center while twisting my face away so I didn’t have to look.

“On your left!” Crystal called out.

Why? Am I really going to turn suddenly with this thing, and blast you? It’s too heavy for that.

She appeared at my left, hand out, and produced a magenta-red beam, aiming for the same spot I was.

“Give me a platform,” I said the words through grit teeth.

A square of forcefield appeared below me. As gently as I was able, I set the gun down. Let the forcefield absorb some of the shuddering and keep at least the lowest side in place.

It also helped me aim on the up-down axis.

“I have to say, baby cousin, you might be overcompensating for something, hauling that thing around.”

“Don’t, please,” I said the words through grit teeth, and I worried I was drowned out by the whine of the machine and the sound of tens of thousands of pounds of meat and blood pouring out of the point where the lasers were drilling into the expanding blob of flesh.

With the golden light illuminating one side of Crystal’s face, and the red light from her hand shining through her hair as the wind stirred it, I saw her looking at me, studying me in the second or two she took away from aiming.

I could almost see the thoughts connect, as she turned her attention back to what we were shooting. Why I’d have a problem with it.

I wanted to be through this. To have it over and done with, to not stress about it or feel sick or hate anymore.

If someone had offered a parahuman cure for it, I might have taken it. Whatever form that cure took.

If—if someone offered me a deal like I’d had, just after Gold Morning, to let me forget it all, I might have taken it.

I hated this, hated enduring.

Other capes added their firepower to ours. Fire, grenade-like blasts, beams, an aerial strike from a master minion, and a buzzsaw or pinwheel that flew out and began chewing its way into the flesh.