Crystal was still blocking the old woman every time she took a step in one direction or another. She glanced at the squad she’d been assigned. Longhorn was ex-retired and Banded was someone he’d brought onto the team who was so new that there wasn’t even dirt on her costume yet.

“Come on!” Crystal hollered, in that authoritative voice she’d learned with the PRTCJ. She started aiming lasers at the woman. The gray flesh was tough. Closer to the consistency of steel or stone, if she judged right.

She’d got her guys’ attention. The other four collapsed in on the woman.

The old woman wasn’t mobile, unless she used her arms to fling herself. She had virtually no legs. The strength they were displaying with broken or oversized limbs was insane, but that was it.

Accordingly, Crystal targeted the arms. When a hand met the ground, she blasted it. It cost the woman key leverage, her hand blown apart, the arm buckling as she landed on her belly. But the wound shed gray gunk, a blunted blob forming there.

Her other hand clawed at the gray gunk, flinging it at Banded. Crystal blocked it with her forcefield. The woman kept trying, kept moving—and Longhorn had an old injury that had never healed, that slowed him down. Really, all he could do was keep the old woman from charging at the ongoing fight with Mom, Aunt Carol, and Uncle Mark.

“Dart!” Banded called out. Her teammates scrambled back as she produced a needle from her wrist, plucked it, and threw it.

The dart sank into the blob of flesh at the woman’s lower half. Veins erupted, crawling out across the woman, and then began to disappear as fast as they were appearing, the gray oatmeal extending out over them.

Crystal kept shooting, running interference with her laser, the forcefield primarily keeping others safe.

Banded stood there, arm outstretched, looking very much like she wasn’t present.

“You don’t have to!” Crystal called out. “We’ve got them pinned. My family’s finishing up the other!”

The man was using his tongue to hold Flashbang’s arms. With the crap that had gathered at his upper body and collected at his legs, he was close to an hourglass in shape, with a twenty-foot tongue lashing out of the middle. His nether regions and lower face were in tatters, split apart by the flow of the oatmeal, then ripped apart further by what followed after.

Flashbang held a grenade that glowed ominously. His eyes locked to Mom, moving his hand, he squeezed fingers alone to pop it up. A forcefield appeared between the orb and him.

The explosion tore apart the tongue and made the man stagger back. Carol cut into him, each strike surgical. There was a drive behind every action, the intensity to which Aunt Carol moved.

It made Crystal almost sad to see.

“I have to.”

She looked back at Banded.