The voice was a whisper, hard to make out from the ambient noise, the screams and groans of those who had hit the wall but not died, and the ones who hadn’t been thrown but who were being executed one by one now.

The scraping sound that followed was like a chainsaw against stone, without the sound of the chainsaw’s engine itself. A skittering, screeching noise that grew in volume.

Metal centipedes appeared on either side of me, each curving to travel around the pillar, straight for me. I brought my forcefield back—

It was broken before I could.

I flew straight up, mindful of the ceiling, and mindful of the fact that my senses couldn’t be trusted.

Sorry, Mukade. I think.

As my forcefield came back, I had forcefield fingernails drag into the pillar I was flying beside. Multiple hands. Below me, the centipedes were moving in a double-helix pattern up the pillar, chasing.

Change shape, I thought. Reshaping my forcefield. Think of the physio. Of moving that monstrous, wretched body, trying to learn how it moved. Reaching out a limb… reaching… straining…

I palmed what my forcefield had grabbed off the pillar.

With enhanced strength, two arms helped me hurl myself around and away from the pillar. A third arm, as long as I could make it, drawing on memory, hurled the handful of concrete bits.

Mukade, already with several holes in his side and back for the centipedes to come out of, got a few more holes in his body. He sat down heavily, head turning slightly, then flopped back, more like a child’s doll than a person. Gone.

“You’ll melt!”

My skin burned, the bandages I still wore on one hand felt unbearably tight.

Blood welled at my neck where I’d just stopped the bleeding, and then it foamed. What had been a slash of a non-cauterizing laser or pressurized blood or whatever else was opening up, parting. A dribble touched my armpit and ran down my side, and it stung like a sunburn.

I had to ignore it. I needed cover from Mathers. I disengaged from my forcefield, and sent her along the ceiling, raking it.

Plumes of dust came down. I used them as a shield.

“You’ll die!”

The whisper again coincided with another attack from the defending parahumans. A man, tall, with about two hundred spidery legs, each of which was at least ten feet long. He was fast, moving fluidly, his body twitching and jerking with the force and speed of the legs, almost a victim of how they relied on other legs for leverage while his body was at the fulcrum point.

He howled.

Little question how he ended up fucked up enough for the Simurgh to get her hooks in.

His legs speared toward me, some extending, narrowing.