Fuck, this gun was heavy. I was strong, but it bogged me down so much, and the Nemean Titan was fast. Ophion was overwhelming, with one of his pets swelling in size like the wall of flesh had, except this one was all tentacles and a center mass that looked like a brain.

And Titan Fortuna was… too much. Overwhelming. Very possibly impossible to defeat.

I studied her, watching every movement, and I was aware from my readings about the Simurgh that even that was a vector for problems when dealing with a sufficiently strong precog.

Her weakness, if it could be called that, had always been that she had always been an ordinary, athletic person at her core. Now she was strong enough that lasers capable of leveling city for miles around weren’t slowing her down.

Her weakness, thinking back to the raid on the Teacher base, was that she was limited in reach to those things that, for lack of a better way of putting it, fell in her earshot, her arm’s reach, or her shadow. She could set off dominoes, but she had to touch the dominoes first.

Now her reach was vast, her shadow terribly long. There wasn’t a domino for miles around that didn’t tremble as she shook the city with her movements, her lower body one solid block, cutting through the city.

I watched, using the limited night vision Kenzie had provided to track the fighting, and saw as the Nemean Lion pounced.

Saw as something resembling a giant featherless bird, moist and bright with the lights around it, the size of a small apartment building, with teeth and a rotted-off nose instead of a beak, met the Titan in the air.

The bird had friends. One bloated and resembling something between a lizard and a toad, three times the bird’s size, when the bird was already massive compared to everything but the Titans themselves. A third one, roughly the same size, built blocky like a cow’s body was, with a stump for a head, and two praying mantis arms with skin stretched over them. It clawed at buildings frantically, hauling itself forward, and its rear half was seemingly endless. Naked pink flesh stretched over entrails that, as it made forward progress, turned out to be longer than any of the Titans were tall.

Fast and, as I watched, mass surged along that tail of endlessly unspooling lower body, reached the upper body with violent force, and almost seemed to give it motive force, hurling it forward.

The Nemean Titan was working on them, slowing them down, but their ‘brainless’ state was a frenzied one that didn’t turn off completely. They kept fighting, blind, aimless and stupid now, and they were big enough and blunt enough as weapons to give him pause.

Contessa continued forward.

Ophion cast out needles. Legend blasted each needle out of the air before it could reach one of the giant flesh-beasts.