“I know,” he said. He closed the distance, running, his movements efficient and made with the wind in mind. Running up one bit of rubble, he leaped just in time to set his feet on one leg that was coming around to smack Sveta. He shouted back to her “Keep shooting where I point!”

“Oh! Bang, bang!”

He ran up the leg, drawing a knife out of his pocket and jamming into a joint. The knife screeched, threatening to break, but it was the mechanism at the joint that broke instead. That would matter later.

He didn’t need to save Sveta. She was swift enough, capable of adapting.

Withdrawal was spraying from his syringe. Green liquid streaked everything.

“Careful!” Withdrawal called out as Five ducked under the stream.

Five’s feet slid over the tinker chemical. It took a second for him to work out the function of it and the alien way it worked, a high-friction chemical, but his power did make sense of it. He leaped out of his boots as the chemical formed a perfect adhesion, then placed his feet on safe grounds in three quick steps in the span of a second.

He slid around to the face of the machine, and dropped down in front of the moving arrangement of lenses that controlled the laser. One by one, he shattered them with pinpoint impacts, or grabbed them as he fell, to jerk them out of orientation. The laser emitted, washing over him with zero focus.

He shattered the glass before it could adjust and fire again.

“It’ll be good to have a rookie on the team!” Withdrawal called out. His green gunk was doing its work, limiting the ability of the machine to rotate. Two of its legs were fixed to the ground, and one joint wasn’t working.

Caryatid was close enough to freeze in place, her arm blocking one leg from moving. It levered against her and began to break. Sveta roped her way down beside Caryatid, and pulled on the more fragile components.

“I’m more experienced than all of you put together.”

“I don’t mean that in a bad way,” Withdrawal said. “Sorry.”

“Ready!” Finale called out.

“Good to go!” Withdrawal called out.

“Take this!”

The detonation rocked the machine, and blew joints apart, broke the housing, and opened it wide. Each detonation that followed was a follow-up to the last.

The chain of detonations finished with what she’d started doing before he’d pointed out the directions. He raised his eyebrows a bit.

Instinct against analysis. Her instincts were good.

As the machine pulled itself apart in the midst of the detonations, the gunk seeping into its internals, Caryatid was left standing in the wreckage. She pulled explosives from her belt and dropped them around herself, before going breaker once again.

He covered his ears as the explosives detonated.

“Woo!” Finale called out. “Please tell me it’s dead!”