Annihilation met energy. Her power didn’t simply erase things in its path, however. It grew, it shrunk, it bent, twisted, stopped, and accelerated. As the detonated energy surged into her power, some of it was magnified, and that same energy escaped the mangling that was supposed to immediately follow.

The effect was that the explosion ripped out inconsistently in every direction. Shelves were knocked over, clothes were scattered, floor and ceiling came to pieces. The sound of it made her temporarily deaf, leaving her ears to absorb and echo the last thing she’d heard—a whipcrack noise coupled with a buzzing that made her teeth hurt. The echo leveled out into a high pitched whine.

She picked herself up. The man with the beard was slower to do the same, and that gave her the opportunity to escape the venue. Past the hole in the wall, out to the city at night.

The city was brighter than it should have been. It wasn’t that her senses were rattled, but that there was another of the damned heroes out here. More energy orbs. These ones clung to the road, rolling and folding into themselves.

A young lady walked through the loose minefield she’d created. Black-haired, she had a flower symbol in black on her chest, petals stretching up from a bar or hilt.

One of the orbs erupted. It became a column, a wall, an unfolding wave of rippling energy that danced along the road in an unpreditable path. Damsel only narrowly evaded it.

There were more lights behind her. The man with the beard.

She couldn’t look at every threat at once. Every time she blinked, the bright lights lingered in dots and trails in her vision. The lights the bearded man made weren’t so distinct from the ones the woman made, when they were dormant. It made it hard to focus, and her focus wasn’t all there.

Another of the ones on the ground erupted. It unfolded in a different way, pillars of light that raced in four different directions. Easier to avoid, but they were coordinating their timing. He’d lobbed one of his lights at her. It wasn’t fast, but it wasn’t so slow she could outrun it, and with her vision already struggling amid so much brightness, it was hard to use depth perception to get a sense of how fast it was traveling.

She blasted it, stumbling back, and light at one corner of her field of vision suggested another of the orbs the flower woman had made was exploding.

“Hold off on the explosions until we know what happened in the store!” a woman shouted. The laser woman. The sound of her voice was rounded off at the edges, as if Damsel was hearing her from just beneath the surface of water.

“Roger,” the man with the beard said.

They were all here now.