She looked at me, and I saw recognition on her face. Too soft to be Damsel recognizing the pain-in-the-ass heroine Antares. That fleeting look was replaced by a look of disgust, then rage, then something even deeper than rage. She brought a hand to her head, and belatedly seemed to remember she had giant, multi-jointed knives for fingers, and couldn’t actually run her fingers through her hair or hold her head. They remained poised there.

The floor below us erupted into a tide of blue light. I stepped back from the hole in the floor, shielding my face.

Self-destruct?

The light dissipated, then came again, this time with a different kind of flow. Instead of a single mass of what could have been plasma or liquid flame, it was a hundred streams that bent at angles and wove into and through one another like a great angular braid.

As they fired, the beams transitioned to become less blue and more red.

The light dissipated.

“Go!” Chevalier called out.

I went, giving Damsel a wide berth. Good thing too, because she used her power to slash out with a wide, fan-like blast that might have maybe grazed me if I’d followed my initial course. I gave her that extra second to get where she was going. Wasn’t worth the risk to follow too soon after.

It ended up making something of a difference. The ground cracked all around us, and segments of floor began coming down in chunks. More holes, more damage. A whole pillar was pulled beneath.

As everything began to cascade down, the Simurgh rose back up, no longer grappling with Dragon. Legend, too, chose a moment to come flying in.

Two of the big three Wardens were present. I wasn’t sure if Narwhal qualified as a stand-in for Valkyrie, but… it was good to see.

The collapse was being rectified, cracks shrunk, holes diminished, and supports raised by way of forcefield and giant stone hands. Byron shifted gears, drawing on the floor with motes, before solidifying them. He’d done the same with ice, back when we’d been fighting the massed Titans, but now he paved a floor of rock with sweeping, shallow conch-like spirals.

She used her telekinesis, and more cracks began to creep out all around us.

“She doesn’t have her hooks in you, but she—” Tattletale’s voice was cut off as she got clear of a cascade of bits of ceiling, high above us.

The environment.

Tattletale had been telling us that yes, we were free of the Simurgh’s influence, but that didn’t extend to the facility.

She supposedly screamed to gather data, and she used the data to inform her precognition. We momentarily had the edge because everything about our movements flowed from Dinah and Dinah being a blind spot. But the environment… she’d already worked out those calculations, already gathered the data and knew the ins and outs of cause and effect here.