Disclaimers:

1) This story is set in the Wormverse, which is owned by Wildbow. Thanks for letting me use it.

2) I will follow canon as closely as I can. However it's been a long time since I've read Worm, don't hesitate to correct me.

3) This disclaimer is shamelessly plagiarized from ack1308. Literally nothing here is original. Really.

I-I-I-I

I-I-I-I

"Get a mover to get us there! She's too fast to follow! And keep trying to hinder her!"

Above the wrecked city center of Madison, dozens of capes were desperately flying after The Simurgh. Her change in strategy had been wholly unexpected. Never before had she actively tried to leave the city and go after their medical center.

Perhaps they should have anticipated that kind of move. The creature was all about terror and destabilization! Slaughtering wounded capes as well as their precious few healers would not only make for a dark day, but also multiply casualties in the following endbringer attacks.

A vibration signaled the arrival of new information on his bracelet. Legend looked at the screen.

Panacea likely target as major healer.

Fourteen other capes on site, including three minor healers.

Evacuation under way

Simurgh ETA : 7 seconds

Dammit! They were not going to make it.

I-I-I-I

To Amy it all happened in a blur. Right as she was having her personal epiphany about the corona Pollentia and a potential lead on the origin of powers, she heard Skipper shift under her hands.

Opening her eyes, she made to slip him a few words of reassurance but she was interrupted by the sound of Dragon's voice coming from another wounded capes' armband. Not from her own patient though, as his right arm and therefore the bracelet attached to it had been sliced off in battle.

"Operating room, The Simurgh is heading to your position, abandon all operations and gather at the priority healing cross. Skipper will evacuate you."

Amy violently trembled at the announcement. She was supposed to be safe! The Simurgh hardly ever left the bounds of the city it was attacking!

She shook her head. No. No use panicking. She just had to take a deep breath and soldier on. Dragon was handling the retreat. She was very close to the evacuation spot. She just had to wheel her charge with her. After all, it wouldn't do to have done all those efforts just to abandon Skipper!

Skipper? Wait, hadn't Dragon said Skipper was going to transport them?

Shit shit shit!

She fought a wave of vertigo as she stood up and hastily looked around the room, trying to locate one of the functional armbands.

There!

She threw herself on a man lying on a stretcher by the entrance, and fumbled at his bracelet. What was the word already? Urgent Override? Ah, no it was-

"Hard override" she yelled into the device. "Skipper down, Skipper down! Unconscious here with us! We need Strider!"

The other people in the room, who had until then managed to stay calm, heard her words and started to scream in panic. One of them sprinted out of the room, and at that the floodgates opened as everyone rushed to the exit. Amy stayed, nervously fiddling with the bracelet. She had sat through enough New Wave reunions to know that her best shot was to follow Dragon's instructions.

"Strider unreachable" Dragon voice came three long seconds later. "Hold on tight, Eidolon is attempting to get to you. Do not leave on your own!"

Very few actually heard the advice over the yells and panicked stampede. None heeded it. Half of them were already outside. Amy walked to the window, hypnotized by the spectacle of people chaotically scattering into the street and more than a little overwhelmed by how fast things had gone downhill.

The casualty rate was always higher out on the open, but it's probably useless to try and convince them of that.

She also had a sinking feeling that the Simurgh's unusual movements had to do with her own actions. Running wouldn't matter much here for her. Better to pray for another teleporter's arrival.

She squinted at the sky. There. She saw a white spot getting bigger, fast. She felt like she was in one of those old westerns, a girl tied to train tracks, reduced to watching her inevitable doom rushing at her.

On the roof of a house close to them, she suddenly saw two people appearing in a flash of light.

A man and a woman. Probably Eidolon and Alexandria then. Why didn't they come here straight away? The power Eidolon grabbed had to be line of sight.

She frantically waved at them. She was nearly safe! It would be a close thing, however. The endbringer was close enough that she could see the shape of her many wings, as well as the car size tinker tech device she was dragging with her.

What is this thing for anyway? She thought distantly.

Unfortunately, she got her answer. Before her would be rescuers could jump again to her position, the machine activated, and space deformed in a two miles radius around them. The roads twisted, a building collapsed, and more importantly, there was a sphere of emptiness around them that looked impenetrable. And Eidolon's ability seemed to be line of sight anyway.

They were all stuck in there! Herself, regular medics, a few healers, a bunch of comatose capes, two thirds of the triumvirate, and the Simurgh.

Her legs quivered and she would have collapsed if not for gravity suddenly taking a momentary leave of absence. It came back in full force a second later and the ceiling groaned above her.

This was not going well.

I-I-I-I

Nearby, Alexandria wasn't much more optimistic about their odds as she cursed vocally. She had not anticipated that the dimension breaching tinker tech The Simurgh had assembled and wielded as a weapon against Cauldron would work a second time.

That damned machine had cost them a bunch of power vials, and now it was keeping the two of them trapped with an Endbringer and the near entirety of their medical personnel to protect.

Then as she felt the psychic, mind bending scream of their enemy come back in full force, she realized that there was nowhere to escape it in their improvised prison.

That was bad, very bad.

"They are practically lost," Eidolon declared grimly by her side, having reached the same conclusion. "It could take minutes for us to get a way out of there. The best we can do is focus on our own survival here."

"So we should give up protecting the healers?" she asked incredulously.

"We don't have much of a choice here. We can't fight her on our own. This might very well have been a trap for us. With the Simurgh, there is no winning, only limiting our losses. Help them if you can, but don't take risks. None of them have our resistance to the Scream anyway, they won't last long."

Alexandria cursed again. She reluctantly nodded and flew off the building. Eidolon followed, all the while blasting plasma projectiles at the Simurgh who was effortlessly dodging those.

Briefly, she she saw a lone girl standing by the window of the medical room, eyes wide, staring at her retreating form in despair. She repressed the surge of frustration and anger at being put in this position.

Then a compressed ball of cars trucks, lampposts and trees was telekinetically dropped onto the building and she lost sight of her in the collapsing debris.

I-I-I-I

Pain and panic had completely overwhelmed her. There was rubble all around her, pressing down on her body. A ringing in her ears left her absolutely deaf to her surroundings and she wasn't entirely sure which way was up. She was inhaling more dust than actual air.

She tried to push off a block of stone that was preventing her from breathing properly. She brought her arms between her chest and the slab but she barely managed to move it at all.

If she could just make enough room to get her knees under the stone, she might be able to roll it off her.

With an incredible effort of will, she lifted the stone again and tried to bring her knees up. Nothing happened. She gave up and had to keep her breaths shallow and short again. Why were her legs not responding? Could she feel them? Yes. Move them? Not really. Why? It didn't matter, she was going to die soon anyway, she lamented.

No, she had to stay focused! Let's sort through things methodically. Could she move her toes?

Then a light bulb went off in her head.

Stupid! The network!

Instead of completing her rudimentary diagnosis, she dived into the network in her neck. Fortunately the months she had spent fiddling with it had left her capable of maintaining it subconsciously, and it was still mostly functional.

In a few seconds she absorbed enough of her own biomass to fully reconstruct her favorite tool, and she hurriedly activated it.

Alright. Systems check!

She giggled. Wait, was it funny? Okay, she was probably in shock. Moving on.

Spine, kidney, abs, left ankle were her main concerns.

She hastily fixed those. It took around thirty seconds, at a pace she had never imagined achieving in her wildest dream. Fortunately her enhancements had spared her the worst of it. She should literally have had all of her limbs fractured, a crushed skull, and instead of tearing halfway into her abs, the metallic rod sticking out from the piece of wall above her should have fully impaled her. She should have been dead already.

Also, having half a ton of stone on her chest should have suffocated her instead of merely making breathing difficult.

She focused back on her current situation. She was roughly patched up, now she had to get free. She manually pumped adrenalin into her limbs and with a grunt, she finally managed to pull the heavy stone slab off her.

Will whoever is screaming just SHUT UP?

It was quite strange that she would here that strident voice when her ear drums didn't seem to be functional. She started at the thought, and with a few additional tendrils of her network she fixed her own hearing.

Soon enough, she could catch the muted sounds of the ongoing battle. It seemed Alexandria and Eidolon were still going all out, as she very much doubted the angelic endbringer would even momentarily be bothered by one of the medics. Or perhaps other capes had managed to reach them?

The screaming woman was still audible, though, and her addled brain finally managed to make the connection to the most horrifying of the enemy's abilities. She nearly yielded to despair. That meant that even if she survived this, she might not be able to go home. The PRT was very wary of anyone who had been subject to the Scream.

Even as tears pooled in her eyes, she tried to remain calm. She had... how much time was it already? Ugh. Around fifteen minutes of exposure. After that, her life would essentially be over.

She saw a body a bit further away in the rubble. She ran toward it and took the man's pulse. Dead. On his wrist was one of the armbands. It apparently hadn't detonated as the cape wearing it was registered as deceased anyway. She looked at the last message.

Simurgh arriving at the medical outpost

Tinker tech apparently activating.

(16min ago)

She felt icy dread flow down her spine.

It was already too late!

Sure, it wasn't an exact science. And exposure that short wouldn't make her a true Simurgh time bomb. But it might significantly affect her. Other victims had shown bouts of uncontrollable rage and irrationality from even shorter interactions with her.

At the very least, if she was ever allowed to see her family again, she would be under heavy supervision. And eventually, the protectorate and the PRT would find out the extent of her power. A potential Nilbog exposed to the Simurgh... She would be locked away forever at best! No wonder the endbringer had stopped paying attention to her. She was over.

Vicky…

No! She refused that fate! She still had too much to do, too much to learn. She had been on the verge of achieving an unprecedented level of understanding of powers. She had been on her way to take an active part into the protection of her city!

She needed to be there for her airhead of a sister! She needed to be there to help her loyal and supportive cousins. Even her dad needed her, especially after he had finally started to open up.

She refused to yield. She. Would. Come. back!

As if mocking her, the sphere of nothingness started to slowly become transparent around them, progressively showing their surrounding again, presumably realigning with the outside world. The sky became visible, as well as the many heroes flying in wait outside.

NO! NO!

She got up and frantically looked for a place to hide. Somewhere the protectorate wouldn't find her. She could stealthily leave afterwards and claim she had managed to get away before the endbringer had arrived! She didn't wear an armband, so they couldn't claim otherwise. It would take work, but she could convince them…

Then she stumbled as she recalled that she had seen Alexandria look directly at her. A thinker with an eidetic memory. Damn it!

Okay, this was still salvageable, she told herself even as hopelessness rose within her. Way harder, and probably a year of isolation or so, but-

She stopped suddenly at the sight of a familiar cape bleeding on the ground.

Skipper.

The endbringer had done a number on him. Again. Yet, somehow, he was still breathing. Not for much longer, but he was.

Trembling, she brought her hands to his face. Suggestions slowly came to her on ways to save him, but there was no way she would take them, especially after being herself affected by the Simurgh. Instead, she focused on the remnants of her spare network. Because the brain wasn't as mobile as the rest of the body, large parts of it were still functional, even after more than fifteen minutes of not being constantly repaired by her power.

She didn't need all of it. She had an idea, but she had no guarantee that it would work. She would try anyway.

Sorry, you deserved better.

She swiftly moved ions around so as to flood his brain with weak currents of electricity, effectively sending him into a seizure as those discharges spread around.

She suppressed her wince as she saw him open his eyes and spasm and she grabbed his head tightly. She brought her mouth to his ear, and yelled.

"RETREAT! RETREAT! TAKE US AWAY!"

The sky lightened above them. She would be spotted soon. Despair filled her. She tried again

"HOME! GO HOME PLEASE! SAFE! HOME!"

And one last attempt, sobbing.

"HOME!"

The world was flipped upside down. The temperature was way higher than it was supposed to be. She was crouching inside an unfamiliar house. An Indian man ran to her.

She passed out.

I-I-I-I

I-I-I-I

A.N.

Thanks you guys for your reviews. And your follows! And your favorites!

I'm taking your corrections into account as soon as I find some time to revisit the previous chapters :)