He had a foot where his head had been, and hands at the end of neck, ankle, and each arm. The shackles seemed to be the point where the changes happened. When he bent to bring a hand toward my face, it was with a crease between what should have been crotch and shoulder and far more flexibility than a man his size should have managed. I struck his hand away with a backhand strike, my forearm catching his wrist. Another hand grabbed me by the belt.

My focus, though, was on the hand that still held the handgun. He had his bearings, and he brought it around to point it at me. I seized it, fingers hooked around barrel and handle both.

I hated guns being brought to a cape fight.

I twisted around, heaving him up and bringing the wretch to bear for some added strength at the last moment. I slammed him into the tree, harder.

His grip weakened. I wanted to fly away, but we both still had a mutual, contested grip on the weapon.

The breaker was coming for me, swelling in my vision. It reached, and fingers brushed through foliage. The greenery stretched like it was ooze, strands and bends and all.

When it snapped, it coiled and curled away like smoke, black with blue sparks in it, like a burning paper might have orange.

The rule for fighting breakers was to not fight them in their breaker state, because the breaker states tended to cheat the rules.

I couldn’t wrestle the handgun free, even with the shackled biker weak from his second visit to the tree’s trunk. I bent his wrist back as far as it could, his fingers bending backward as I brought the gun over to one side. His hand began changing, the front of the hand becoming the back, fingers finding angles to grip the gun. He reaffirmed his grip.

He did, however, also lose a bit of ground around the trigger. I checked, then shifted my grip more to the handle and the area around the trigger guard, before pulling the trigger repeatedly. Not easy, given the angle. Not easy, when each shot kicked and was loud, and I had a breaker lurking at the corner of my vision, not registering as having any depth in my depth perception.

I wasn’t quite sure what would happen, but I gripped one of the shackles. For just a moment, I let the wretch out, giving myself the strength to crush it in my hand.

For that same moment, the wretch did something, and the entire body jerked, cloth ripping.

The metal shackle broke, and the hand spasmed, letting go of the handgun.

There was a wound in his stomach, and it closed as he lay there. At the same time, his hand multiplied, swelled, had fingers and teeth appear, and became a misshapen blob. The effect crawled up his arm to his body, which bloated and swelled.