“Ick.” the background noise said, sounding very much like someone with stiff enunciation was whispering in my ear. “Sick.”

A building, leaning against another building, creaked. Again, the sound threatened to become a sound, and my brain reached to interpret it as a human utterance, even though I knew it wasn’t.

“Awww. Uugggh.”

The tracker Dragon was providing me with fritzed, going dark, showing a vague Simurgh silhouette in the cloud, then another, a hundred feet away.

After that second guess, there was nothing. Only the cloud of cover she’d made, labels and indicators for where people were being tracked by the phones or other devices they carried, and alerts for distant battlefields.

The battlefield went still, quiet. A few powers flickered and flared, but the dust hung in the air.

The screaming I’d come to take as steady background noise ceased. My brain felt like my body did in the stillness after a hard workout, blood pulsing through it, shaky, and a bit vulnerable.

I flew down to be closer to my team. Just in case.

Dragon’s spherical craft was crackling, sending out spherical waves that rippled over the crowd, over parts of the battlefield. A whole section of the dust cleared away, stripped of the Simurgh’s telekinetic hold.

She chose that moment to emerge, while our eyes were searching the gap for any sign. She wasn’t even that far from me. From Breakthrough.

The scream tore through my senses, everyone’s senses, delaying our response. The countdown timer in the corner of my vision whirred, a speedometer flying by, costing me tens of seconds with every moment.

Byron had motes ready to go. Dark blue motes consolidated into something like coral, between stone, organic, and ice, with a faint spiral to it. A spear, thrust at the Endbringer, who took the blow to one shoulder. A scar to join a dozen others. Light blue motes hung in the air, fat blue fireflies with trails left behind them.

She leaned back away from it, changed direction, plunging into another group. Villains from Semiramis’s faction.

We had others nearby. I could hear Finale’s voice, distant, setting up her attack. Withdrawal was perched nearby, Sveta beside him.

Gibbet was creating a barrier, a cluster of metal barricades and fencing that emerged in different sizes and angles.

The Dragon-craft drew nearer. The Bakunawa Zero, with its pulses that disrupted powers and power effects. I knew the idea was to throw as much chaos as possible at the Simurgh, to disrupt her reads, to scramble her signal and her information gathering as she screamed.