What was liquid became solid. Each teaspoon of liquid became seven and a half grams of rock-hard solid matter, expanding out as crystal, three-quarters of a mile long, encasing Titan Cinereal’s head and shoulder, before the weight came to rest on the Titan. The construction didn’t break under its own weight.

The Titan disintegrated all matter within a hundred feet of it, but the metal didn’t change. What had disintegrated into dust became fire, exploding outward.

It didn’t hurt the configuration of the crystallized stream.

Dragon scanned, searching for weak points, analyzing structure… and had the Vibria fire her shot. The nanotech bullet struck Cinereal, exploded out to a film across Cinereal’s side, and began disintegrating on contact. The Titan, already straining against the weight, sagged. She tried to move, but she was slower, dragging the crystal. She started to disintegrate matter, and she stopped.

Unfortunate.

If the Titan couldn’t move to new locations, all she was doing when she disintegrated matter around her was digging a hole beneath herself. If she had the spike attached to her head, she would end up dangling above that hole.

Titan Pouffe reached out, creating mist, and the mist flickered, the spaces between the mist depicting a variety of possible destinations.

Giving Titan Cinereal a means of escape. More cloudstuff gathered around Cinereal, buoying her with an impossible strength. The original Pouffe’s power, writ large.

Our cue to act. She had the Bakunawa take off.

The Uther used thrusters, dropping all shields to get a bit more forward momentum, while sensors struggled to capture Titan Custodian expanding out throughout the sky around him. He took some evasive action, accepted one glancing hit, passed over Titan Pouffe…

And magnets kicked into action in sequence. The thirty-foot spear he’d just fabricated in the Uther’s belly now launched, firing straight down at the pink and black Titan that was clothed in gauzy mist. The nanotech head divided molecules and passed through Titan Pouffe as if she weren’t there.

The Bakunawa intersected Titan Cinereal as she trudged toward the gateway that would take her halfway across the city. Dragon sent out warnings.

It was a scattershot approach. Defiant’s shot had been singular, focused on an immediate problem and an achievable answer. He’d done damage, but the Titan hadn’t fallen, and the portal was still up.

Dragon’s approach was to use every system she could that could disrupt time, space, temperature, gravity, even by the smallest degrees. Titan Cinereal was halfway through the cloud-portal when the mist shifted abruptly and the portal distorted.

Sheared by the distortion, Titan Cinereal left a quarter of her body, mostly lower body, behind, the rest of her dropped off near Gimel’s analogue to Boston.