A damaged building shifted position, and the largest icicle that had formed at the lowest point of the gutter broke free.

A startled crow took flight.

⊙

Dragon

The strain was getting to everyone present. Hair was unwashed, costumes had accumulated grime as moisture from snow and ice had collected, then absorbed airborne grit. Some of those present had come off of battlefields, from expeditions, and from rescue efforts.

It was harder to figure out how to stand or what to do when among her peers than it had been when she had been maintaining a lie.

She had a body that stood straight, when everyone else present took the opportunities to sit or to lean. Resting against walls, leaning over crates with hands planted firmly in front of them, or taking a seat on stairs. She was unsure if she was supposed to feign fatigue of her own, which could be construed as deceptive, or if she did more harm by appearing above it all.

Disconcerting.

While her mechanical body with a vat-grown biocomputer core was waiting for people to arrive in the grand lobby of the Wardens’ headquarters, she piloted four ships she had built earlier in the day.

The situation was that Titan Cinereal was drawing closer and closer to their perimeter around the Machine Army’s installment on Gimel. Pouffe and Custodian were assisting. There were not enough capes on the scene.

Titan Pouffe was the one who had brought the three Titans there, producing cloud gateways that let them move hundreds of kilometers. Each passage of a Titan was followed by a distortion of the air and landscape, extending from the entry point to the exit point. Buildings were flattened. Capes who weren’t alerted in time were thrown to the side with force enough to kill well before they were dashed to pieces on the nearest bit of scenery.

Dragon had child processes running, scanning to keep track of every theoretical stopping point between established Pouffe portals and targets of any theoretical interest to the Titans. Capes in the way were ordered to move.

Back in the headquarters, she took a step to the side to let a tinker vehicle roll by, studying the tech before recognizing it as Wheelie’s. He was taking advantage of the workshops and materials that had been left behind by Teacher. This was good work.

On the battlefield, the Bakunawa Zero was her tool against Pouffe, a ship loaded down with ten different disruption factors. EMP, a gravity disruptor that had been converted from a failed attempt at making an antigravity device capable of lifting a town, an engine modified from the work scavenged from the Thomais Fallen that would push time manipulation attempts off by microseconds, forward, back, or to either side. The list went on. Temperature, radiation, causality, biological signals…