The flashback image of Amy’s face crossed my mind, alarming and disconcerting, gross, perplexing. Somehow tied to the former thought.

The portal startled all of us as it ripped into existence.

I think we were all just a little bit surprised when we started moving toward the portal in complete synchronicity. Because none of the others had hesitated, that was a big part of it. But also surprise that we, ourselves, hadn’t hesitated either.

The portal was the way to our next battlefield. It wouldn’t put us in Shin, not when Shin was probably as pissed as they’d ever been. It wouldn’t put us near Arachne. That made a complicated situation worse. Not near Lab Rat, if he was engaged with the Titan.

It would put us outside. In between Titan Fortuna and her goal. The strongest of the Titans with our destruction as her goal.

Infrared 19.4

Our destination was a spot where one of the Titans had made his first appearance. It hadn’t been pretty, and it made the cracking especially bad. Chasms too wide to jump across, and two cracks that extended skyward, one forking about two hundred feet up. They weren’t easy to see on their own, black sky against a dark gray backdrop, but the wind and moisture in the air did funny things around the edges, or snow got caught. It gave them a faint gray outline.

Capes were gathered in loose groups, with Case Fifty-Threes being the largest cohesive group. What we were getting did not feel like enough.

Seventy capes, give or take five or so. It was hard to track them in the gloom.

Buildings had fallen, and in some places, those fallen buildings formed bridges over the cracks. Gregor the Snail was already out there, shirtless, cementing them together into something more stable. Tristan was below me, focusing on areas where the cracks were five or more feet across, but weren’t canyons and chasms. Red lights drifted around the cracks, then manifested with crunching, stone-on-stone sounds, erupting violently and then crumbling in a series of stages. When he did it right, the rubble wedged against itself, covering the gaps.

It was a massive problem, that the cracks spread around us like they did. It made me think of fighting on rooftops more than anything. The area of each ‘island’ was often akin to the footprint of a building. Getting around necessitated leaping from one pile of rubble to a ‘rooftop’ five feet down and five feet away.

Fuck up, fall into the gap? It was a terminal distance down to the ground. Same principle as a fight on city rooftops. Unreliable footing, all wind and slipperiness factors increased fivefold? Same as on rooftops.