I caught a glimpse of one by the gun he was holding, and moved around the corner. They all moved the same way when they moved, pistols held up, gripped in two hands that were dotted in drops of drying blood, pointed at the ceiling. I saw the gun before I saw the rest of him.

The lullaby continued, faint and distant. It wasn’t enough to obscure any scuffle I made. I didn’t want to make noise, and whatever the movies showed, it was hard to crawl around while wearing boots and be sure to not make any sound.

I didn’t like flying. I wasn’t confident in it like I had been. Two years had passed in the hospital, and my sense of flight had been as disturbed as the movement of my arm or my attempts at vocalization. It was supposed to be back, but it was a muscle I hadn’t exercised.

I wanted to fly, but it was tainted.

I raised myself off the ground, still hunched over, staying low enough that the counters would block me from sight, and used flight as much as light pushes on the sides of the cabinet to propel myself away from the advancing gunman.

I had other training to draw on that wasn’t self-taught. There was what I’d learned and absorbed from time with family, but that whole experience was so full of pitfalls I barely wanted to touch on it.

The Wards. I hadn’t been with them for long. I’d absorbed some things from Dean, because I lived the cape stuff and Dean was willing to teach it. I’d studied up and I’d taken the tests. I knew the numbers and the labels. I knew the approach formations for squads. Simple, making conflict with parahumans as textbook as possible, black ink on white paper, sans serif.

In fighting that perpetual battle of trying to think things through and still act in time, the classifications were a nice shortcut. Apply the label, assume what worked against most people of one classification, and if it clearly didn’t, it was still a starting point.

He was edging closer.

Kingdom Come was a breaker and a master. He had a toggled state that changed the rules as they pertained to him. Shake, blow up, and he was now a horde of people controlled by the bodily fluids on them. Masters were second highest priority as targets, breakers were targets that required timing, often hitting them when they were in the state that they were weakest.

Kingdom Come made that complicated by not giving me a body to target.