Cyborg and Jinx had managed to avoid any entanglements during their getaway. On Jinx's suggestion, he had rigged one of his rockets to behave like a time bomb, and planted it in an alleyway. The two of them were long gone by the time it went off, and the few kids they had seen went straight past their hiding spot and towards the sound of the explosion.
Fixit had provided coordinates for where they were headed, a battlefield where Jinx and Starfire had taken down one of the giant pumpkin things. That had happened several hours ago, even though Cyborg felt it'd been ages since the night started.
He was greeted by an unwelcome sight only three blocks away: a pool of bloody slime had spread out that far. It didn't have a uniform consistency, though: a thin layer of darkened crimson over the pavement was covered by a mat of centimeter-length brownish fibers. Cyborg checked the nearest sewer drain, which would normally have prevented a spread of this magnitude, and saw that the edge of the holes were covered with a dense collection of those brown fibers, rising up from the pavement to form a sort of dam.
"Well, the one we fought in the water had that white foam stuff for clotting," Jinx commented. "Maybe the larger terrestrial ones have this stuff instead."
"Yeah, or maybe the solid stuff on the inside takes longer to dissolve." Cyborg added. "I'm just happy it doesn't smell like the sewer one did, that was just nasty."
She shivered in disgust. "No kidding. Well, unless your equipment can pick up anything new here, we'd best keep going."
It took him a second to figure out that was a suggestion. "Just a second," he said as he started scanning. He had a slightly difficult time taking her seriously, after what she'd done to her hair. The pink coil on the back of her head simply lacked the commanding presence that horn-shaped projections on both sides of her head gave her. The whole thing where she gave herself an alternate hairstyle seemed a little silly in itself, but if he knew much about hair he'd probably have some of his own. There were times when accusations of frivolity might be called for, but this wasn't one of them.
The panel on his forearm showed hints of a couple unidentified substances other than those he'd found in that sewer pumpkin hours ago; but he couldn't run a full chemical analysis without a lot more time. "There's a couple different things in there, but I got nothing useful about what they might do. Let's go."
They continued in what Cyborg had decided was "standard" procedure: Jinx covered the ground across the alley to the next block, then signaled when the coast was clear for his considerably-less-stealthy self to move up. It might not have been perfect, but it did a good job of preventing him from being spotted. And it went smoothly for the next two blocks.
But on the third, at the far edge of the last building before their destination...something was wrong. She froze for a second after peeking out past the building, then spent a moment looking left and right anxiously. She then turned around, darted behind a block of concrete debris near the mouth of the alley and crouched behind it.
A few seconds later, she glanced past her cover, then signaled Cyborg forward with her arm. Something was wrong. Even if he hadn't noticed that her arm motion was more rigid and less relaxed than it had been, it'd be strange for her to signal him to intermediate cover; they'd agreed to wait until any observers were past before she'd signal.
So if it wasn't an observer that was concerning her...what was it?
Cyborg crept forward to Jinx's position. Looking past the piece of concrete, which was pretty easy since he was taller than it was, he saw what could only be described as a disaster. Half of the building appeared to have been shattered, debris of various sizes was strewn across what must have been a plaza around it, and the entirety of the street was covered with that bloody slime.
But even that looked better than what remained of the one-story-high pumpkin. It was impaled on a sturdy spike of building, if the grotesquely coated shard piercing the top of its shell was any indication. On the ground below it was a large pile of some kind of pulp, and four shriveled brown lengths trailed from the bottom of the husk.
It was then that Cyborg noticed a foul smell. He didn't quite recognize it, but it made him think of pork that had gone rancid, along with the bitter scent of cabbage. Thankfully, the smell wasn't anywhere near overpowering; but he couldn't be sure how much of that was due to the distance to source, instead of potency.
"Get down!" Jinx whispered.
He complied, though crouching behind her so he couldn't be seen over the debris did nothing to block the view from the left or right. "Why are we holding here?"
"You'll see," she said in a low, somber tone. Then she peered around the edge of the concrete, before darting forward several feet. She paused for a moment to look around, including a glance back at Cyborg, who'd peeked out from the edge to wait for her signal. She turned away, then sprinted towards a large L-shaped piece of debris, whose open side faced Cyborg. After she looked in all directions over it, she ducked down and motioned Cyborg forward.
He made his way forward, thinking he should have pressed harder on Jinx's decision to make an intermediate stop.
A wave of dizziness hit him as he passed out of the alley. Then, as he stood looking, he saw the source of Jinx's concern. Before, the street had been coated with the slime stuff. But now, he saw scattered areas devoid of red. Each such area had a gray mass in its center, and lines of brown fibers radiated away from the mass. Near each such mass was a large piece of building debris with markings, like a mess of deep, straight scratches. The markings were new, he was sure he'd have noticed them before...
Recalling Jinx's earlier impatience, Cyborg shook his head then rushed over to her, sitting with his back to the side of the debris opposite her. "Pretty sure that wasn't a hologram," he whispered. He ran some scans to check, and the results on his forearm panel confirmed his guess. "The only tech I'm reading, besides mine, is the city-wide jamming thing. But it's not anywhere near strong enough to be responsible, or to keep me from seeing what is responsible."
"Illusion," Jinx suggested. She seemed a little on-edge. "Were those corpses?"
Cyborg wasn't quite sure what she was referring to at first, but then he noticed that those grayish masses did have a vaguely human shape. "Can't say I was really looking. Should be able to scan one of them from here, though."
He took a deep breath. "You seem nervous," he commented as he prepared his scanning equipment for the task. Having taken a more intentional look at the shape, it did resemble a corpse, but...distended. With bloated skin, particularly where the face and belly would be, and with small streaks of dark orange amidst pale gray. He didn't want to look at it any more than he had to.
Jinx exhaled sharply. "We're dealing with someone who not only does gross stuff like this, but someone able to hide it! What else have we missed, and what else are we going to miss?"
Cyborg's eye widened as he got the results of his scan back. He also tried to ignore the feeling in the pit of his stomach. "It is a human body, but it's been stuffed full of whatever is in that pumpkin blood. I don't know how, and I sure don't want to think about it."
"I'm more worried about 'why', honestly. Whatever the reason, it can't be good."
He shivered. "Good point. Afraid I'm not trained as a medical examiner, so all I can say is he died over twelve hours ago. Which...seems odd. I don't like saying this, but with as many kids as they've got, it'd be easy to get...well—"
"—to get fresh corpses, yeah. This whole 'mystery' thing keeps getting deeper and darker."
"No kidding. I don't even know where to start with those weird markings."
Jinx looked at him with some confusion. "What markings?"
Cyborg took another deep breath, and forced himself to look at the nearest body. "See there," he said as he pointed, "above and to the right of the concrete behind it?"
Jinx squinted for a second. "Huh. Didn't notice that before, must've been distracted by the bodies and potential bear-thing."
Cyborg blinked. He'd nearly forgotten that thing was circling the main building, or at least it was when he had left Fixit. Didn't change the significance of his statement, though. "Well, the illusion hid the marks, but not the concrete itself; have to think the marks are important."
"Makes sense. It's weird though, this illusion is so oddly...specific. It covered up the missing blood on the streets, the bodies, these marks...but not the debris those marks were made on? And we could still see each other across the boundary?"
He was no expert on magical illusions, but he did think it'd probably have been easier to disguise the entire area from the outside, instead of a few specific parts of it. But it did bring to mind another question..."Do you think the bear is illusory, a decoy maybe? The cameras didn't show any bodies, so either this all happened very recently, or they were affected by the illusion too."
Jinx was silent for a moment. "No, I don't think so. If it were a decoy, it'd be here to keep people from approaching. It'd make more sense to use one of those hard-to-miss giant pumpkins for the shape of a decoy, instead of a bear thing that we've only actually seen one of. Anyway, I can't get a good look at those marks from here, we need to get closer; good thing we're unlikely to have an invisible assailant."
Lacking any better idea, Cyborg looked around for any signs of a visible assailant, and found none. "Alright then, let's get over there."
Jinx checked for herself that the coast was clear. She then darted across the short intervening length to the nearest marked section of concrete, with Cyborg closely behind. He kept watch for anyone appearing, which made it easy for him to avoid looking at the bloated corpse only a couple feet away.
"They're runes," Jinx eventually proclaimed.
Cyborg's mind predictably went to video games first. "You mean like magical rocks?" He opted to focus his sight on the runes in question, to keep the body in his peripheral vision.
His peripheral vision also noticed Jinx tilting her head, a move that would've been far easier to notice if she still had the horns coming out the side of her head. "I can't say for sure whether it's magical or not, but I mean the systems of writing."
"Huh, " he said in the moment that allowed his curiosity to surface. "What do they say?"
She shook her head. "I can't read them."
He looked directly at her, now. "You can't?" he said with surprise.
She looked back at him. Her frown told him that she took that as a challenge. But a second later, she took a deep breath and relaxed her eyebrows. "Look," she said as she rolled her eyes, "runes aren't a language, they're a series of alphabets. And I don't know what language these two lines are supposed to be. For all I know, they could be random characters chosen to 'look cool' instead of having any actual meaning."
"Oh," was all the response Cyborg could come up with, before he chuckled sheepishly. "Learn something new every day, I guess."
"The weirdest part here, is that this particular alphabet is the Elder Futhark. It fell out of common use over a millennium ago. If there is some meaning to them, it's from long ago."
The conversation was ended by the sound of a high-pitched hiss. In the second it took him to realize he was supposed to be looking out, Jinx had already ducked out of the way of a sphere of glowing black energy. Cyborg quickly armed his sonic cannon and aimed in the direction of the ball's origin, as Jinx readied a couple hexes.
He saw it standing forty feet away. It was clearly the same kind of bear thing as the one they'd dealt with earlier, with silver-tipped black bristles for fur. This one, however, beat Cyborg's own height by a couple feet, and carried a definite sneer where the earlier one had no facial expression worth remembering.
Then it made one of those weird barks, and—
"So you are the ones wasting our time, wasting away our world."
Cyborg was reasonably certain he hadn't actually heard those words, nor did he recognize the deep, rumbling voice in his head. Recalling his potential auditory damage, he asked Jinx for confirmation. "Did you hear—"
Another bark, this one with a hint of a snarl in it. "Spare me the quivering of your disgusting flesh. Your insolence is intolerable, your blasphemy inexcusable."
Cyborg frowned. "Let's blast 'em," he whispered to Jinx.
He fired his sonic cannon at it while Jinx threw a couple hexes at the ground under it, but it simply stepped to the side, without taking its eyes off of them. In defiance of its apparent bulk, it was agile enough to avoid their attack entirely. Then it barked thrice, but with a strange set of varying inflections on each.
He heard a light cracking sound, and noticed Jinx gasp and backflip away. He also saw one of those lines of runes glow a neon green, and the body inflating slightly, with bright orange cracks glowing as the skin broke...
He turned to run a second too late. The concussive force of the explosion hurled him through the air, and into what remained of the central building. He felt colliding with what was left of the wall more than he heard it, but hearing it at all meant his audio reception hadn't been blown offline. Yet.
Cyborg heard another bark as he picked himself up off the ground. "That animal husk served against defilers. The soul once within is now granted the forgiveness of the Green One. Cease your resistance, that your own redemption may come easier."
Jinx snorted. "That's your offer, 'die quicker'?"
An annoyed bark. "Do not waste our time, your pleas are nothing."
"Pleas?!" Jinx scoffed.
It raised an arm over its head, showing the three ivory claws extending an inch from its paw. Jinx took a step away from it, and Cyborg aimed his sonic cannon at the large piece of concrete in front of it. But instead of charging over the barrier as either of them had expected, it made a quick series of slashes with both arms at the concrete.
Then another series of oddly inflected barks. A wall of ice, with a deep orange glow, grew up from the debris and stretched towards Jinx, forming myriad razor-sharp edges on its surface.
Cyborg's instinct to fire kicked in before he remembered to adjust his aim, and the blue-and-white beam predictably pulverized the piece of concrete. To his surprise, the ice stopped growing; In fact, its glow abruptly died out and its previously smooth sheets were covered with tiny cracks as the entire structure began to melt.
Jinx, who had apparently evaded the ice razor wall by sprinting the thirty or so feet from where she was to where Cyborg was now, stood behind him. "Pretty sure it doesn't understand English," she said. "Did you see where it went?"
"No," he answered, "I lost track of it when all that concrete filled the air." He checked around with his infrared vision mode, but didn't find it. Of course, the first bear thing had barely shown up on that mode before, so it was a long shot to begin with. "Still can't find it. Got a plan?"
"Keep it moving, it needs those runes for its spells, so we don't give it the chance to make them."
"Would explain pawing at the trash. How are we gonna beat it, though? The other bear was fast and strong enough, and this one's faster and bigger."
"Same way we handled the other one, pull the rug out from under it. Or...we could drop buildings on it, for a change of pace. Look, we don't have time for a committee, if it sneaks up on us—"
Her sentence was cut short by the wall next to her exploding outward, throwing her several feet away. She landed in a heap, but Cyborg didn't have the chance to react to anything other than the set of claws lunging at his face.
He ducked under the clawed paw, and threw a heavy punch at the hard-to-miss body with a yell. The bear thing didn't make a sound, but did shift its weight on one of its legs. Right before snapping that leg forward to kick him. Cyborg staggered back a couple steps from the force.
It raised an arm to strike, but stopped with its arm in the air. A sadistic, almost evil grin crept onto its face, and the three claws receded into its paw with a soft sound of scraping crystal; like the metallic ring of a sword being unsheathed, but lingering on a few specific high pitched frequencies. The trivia center in Cyborg's mind informed him that bear claws aren't retractable. Just in case he hadn't already figured out that this thing only superficially resembled a bear.
It leaned forward with a wide horizontal swing of its paw, which Cyborg hurriedly stepped back to avoid, before taking a single step forward to maintain its balance. It barked again, before making a punch with its other arm, and Cyborg experienced a most unusual form of multitasking. It did seem the thing conveyed its entire message at the same time, and he only "heard" it in its mind at normal sentence length...but it didn't seem to require any conscious effort to understand, either; he could hear it clearly without distraction mid-fisticuffs.
"I wonder, metal man..."
Cyborg simply leaned out of the way of the comparatively clumsy blow, and countered with a jab of his own. His fist contacted pointed fur, and his opponent recoiled; but when Cyborg attempted to follow up with a stronger punch, the creature swung its arm down, knocking Cyborg's out of the way. It then smoothly reversed the motion into a backhand, hitting Cyborg on the side of his head.
"...are you an animal that partially rejected flesh..."
He consciously disregarded his internal alarm as well as the pain. He defensively swung his arm off to the side, and successfully blocked the thing's attempt to strike him upside the head again with that same arm. The look of surprise on its face was only a minor reward: it had leaned forward for its failed attempt, putting its head in range; Cyborg felt obligated to deliver an uppercut with his free arm.
"...or are you another moving statue, adorned with meat in mockery?"
It grunted in pain, and stumbled back a few steps. Cyborg noticed that the grunt sounded significantly louder in one "ear", even though the creature being directly in front of him would normally mean the sound should be equally loud. This confirmed Cyborg's suspicion about his internal alarm: it was telling him that his audio reception had been damaged, and his hearing was impacted.
This wasn't the time to be worrying about it, though. He wasn't making much headway with the punching routine, so he deployed his sonic cannon and fired at the thing.
If the roar was any indication, the attack was clearly successful. It sounded more angry than pained, though. The creature dashed forward against the beam, and kicked Cyborg's arm hard enough to force it to point skyward. Then with a single motion, it turned its wrist, extended a single claw, and thrust it towards Cyborg's exposed elbow.
He yelled as the claw effortlessly punctured the outer plating of his arm chassis. He had a split second to notice the look of rancor on the monster's face, before it silently jerked its arm up, tearing his arm open all the way to the end and effectively gutting his sonic cannon with a single motion.
Cyborg was too preoccupied with the pain to maintain his footing, and the next kick tossed him through the air a few feet and he landed on his stomach. The creature was apparently content to lumber towards him slowly, and he made no attempt to stop it. Not because he had given up, but because he'd seen some pink movement through the gap between the thing's legs. Whatever she was going to do, she could use all the time she could get, and that meant Cyborg wasn't going to prompt the monster to move more quickly.
As the creature approached, Cyborg had the opportunity to examine the results of his sonic blast. The fur had been blasted away, but under it...Cyborg guessed it resembled some kind of black-and-gray wood, though it certainly hadn't felt like wood under there when he punched the thing. The wooden fibers around the edge of the shallow wound, if it could be called a wound, were frayed and warped.
Cyborg groaned as the creature set a foot on his back, pinning him to the ground. He tried to push back against the weight, but his mechanical muscles were optimized for his limbs; his back simply didn't have the kind of force he needed. He considered using his arm and legs to unsettle the monster, but it had just demonstrated how readily it could disable his limbs, and that hurt. He decided he'd only have one shot, so he'd wait for Jinx to give him an opportunity.
Another bark, this one with a patronizing tone. Though the bark itself was louder in one ear than the other, the words in his head weren't affected.
"I see your tenacity was not exaggerated. Even so, the power granted by the Green One has allowed me to eclipse you. You would still be intact had you not chosen further resistance."
Not willing to waste a clever remark on an opponent unable to understand the words, he chose a frown as his response.
Another bark. "The same could not be said of your companion, but her death would have come with less pain. Now, she must be broken, lest she affront the Green One further."
Cyborg didn't appreciate the few seconds of silence that followed. His efforts to ignore the sheer pain sparking in his forearm didn't benefit from the lack of distraction. Shifting his focus to possible repair scenarios helped only slightly, but it did help. He figured that with a couple minutes to work, he could get his arm operable and compensate for his lopsided audio reception. He'd need to replace the forearm to get his sonic cannon functioning, though; good thing the Tower was already on the itinerary.
A bemused bark. "Nearly impossible to pin down. Clearly the lucky one of you two. Pity the plan isn't to catch her and purge you."
Cyborg saw the flash of purple in the distance, and carefully turned his functioning hand to face its palm against the street. The creature's posture lurched forward when the hex blindsided it, which Cyborg took as his cue.
With a yell, he shoved his working arm against the surface, enough to throw the monster off his back and face first onto the pavement. Cyborg quickly got to his feet, not expecting the thing to stay put.
"Get over here!" Jinx yelled, as another hex flew towards the bear-thing. It had resumed a standing position by the time the hex hit the street in front of it, letting gravity plunge it into the sewer or whatever else happened to be below.
Cyborg dutifully jogged towards Jinx, holding his damaged arm against his chest with his other arm. He then saw Jinx cross her arms, then quickly spread them with a yell, sending an abnormally wide hex at what remained of the building.
The purple energy slammed through the base of the already-ravaged building. A deep rumble filled the air as drywall started to collapse and fall to the ground. As Cyborg watched, mentally reconciling the direction of what his hampered hearing heard with what he saw, he noticed that the pieces falling down were much smaller than the most of the debris that littered the street when they had arrived.
A few seconds later, the cacophony stopped. Nearly a fifth of what had remained of the building was now a huge pile of rubble. A pile centered on the hole Jinx had created under the bear-thing.
"Turnabout is fair play, huh?" he commented.
"Hell yes," she confirmed. The she looked at his wrecked arm. "Are you going to make it?" she asked, sounding concerned. He had almost missed the split second where her eyes widened at the sight of the damage.
"Yeah. I'll need a couple minutes to rig some backups, but my arm and hearing will be workable then. Cannon'll have to be replaced, but we're going to the Tower anyway." Now that he had a few seconds to collect his thoughts, some implications just occurred to him. "You didn't happen to crush anyone alive in there, did you?"
She shook her head. "I was here when that pumpkin split the building down the middle with a single swipe. Anyone who survived that kind of force and wasn't pushed out a window by the shockwave, would have had this demon to contend with. So what'd it say to you, I only heard the barking after the rock massage."
He took a deep breath. "Called me a metal man, mentioned another 'moving statue', said I was tenacious, lots of crap about a 'Green One', said you were lucky, and the plan was to catch me and kill you."
"'Lucky'?!"
"Yeah, kinda delusional wasn't it?"
"OK, we need to keep going. Which way is the Tower?"
"Umm..." He checked his internal navigation, and was displeased with the results. "That way?" he suggested meekly, pointing to what remained of the nearby building that happened to lie in the way of a direct route.
She sighed. "Figures. Come on."
"Wait. You know this hurts, right?" he said, indicating his arm with a nod of his head. He felt like he was whining a bit, but he certainly didn't want to get into another fight with his arm tied behind his back. Or hanging limply at his side, for that matter.
"We'll find somewhere safe along the way, don't worry about that. I'm pretty sure the bears are the ones in charge now, and the pumpkins are going to know exactly where that one is. Worry about that."
He had to agree. Getting ambushed in the middle of working on his systems would be spectacularly bad. "Good point. Let's go, then."
She headed around the building at a pace just short of jogging, and he followed. He thought her choice of speed was odd, since she was clearly capable of going much faster, but he didn't want to push her. Particularly since he didn't think he could keep up with her sprinting for long even if he was in good condition, and the inability to move both arms freely cut back how much momentum he could harness.
They were a short ways around the corner of what was now a ruin, when he felt the ground under his feet vibrating. He and Jinx both stopped, as the vibrations grew stronger and the sound of a deep rumble became apparent. Then, with an overwhelming loud crash, the entire pavement shattered and fell several feet down.
Jinx displayed her cat-like sense of balance by using all four limbs to remain standing as her footing fell off at an angle, taking her with it. Cyborg simply fell over, though he managed to keep his head from hitting anything.
As Cyborg found enough level space to get back on his feet, he realized the loud crash had turned into a series of smaller crashes. He turned to look behind him, in the direction of what had been the building...and past the rising dust cloud, the structure was falling onto, or into, the ground.
By the time the sounds had stopped, he could only recognize the building as the debris that had overflowed the street and started to fill the crevice he and Jinx were presently in the bottom of. The rubble stopped flowing, which he supposed was a good thing, but it didn't bode well for the fate of the city block. Jinx covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve as the dust started to float down, and Cyborg did the same.
A defiant bark. "The earth itself acknowledges the Green One! It defies even your hard prison on top of itself."
Then, another bark. This one had a different, and lower, pitch to it though; and Cyborg couldn't quite tell due to his hearing impairment but it seemed to have originated from a different direction.
No words were carried, but barely a second later the bark indicating their attacker responded, and again no words were carried. They alternated back and forth five more times, with shifting tones.
The last bark in the chain was from the distance. The fury behind it was almost palpable. Then, silence reigned for a few seconds.
A moment later, Cyborg saw movement along the ground. A wide swath of bright red, so thin it might as well have been a film over the ground, was flowing across the ground and around obstacles in defiance of gravity. He was standing on a piece of road that was slightly elevated, so at least the stuff wasn't streaming over his feet.
"Is that the blood that was in the bodies?" Jinx asked.
Cyborg's instinctive move to bring up his scanner was answered with a surge of pain. He grunted in surprise for only a second. "Sorry," he gasped, "scanner was in the arm. Can't tell ya."
Then there was a bark, the pitch indicating the nearby creature. "Your existence has been ordained to continue briefly. Proceed to your 'tower', that I may rectify this. Or wait here for brevity to expire."
Cyborg heard only silence for a few seconds. He couldn't be sure that the silence was authentic, though, and his doubts were reinforced by the way Jinx cocked her head and looked out the corner of her eyes.
She then turned her head, and ran off in that direction, towards where two edges of fragmented pavement met. His unspoken question of where she was going answered itself as he saw her destination: the debris collected in that corner formed a mound high enough to reach out of the pit. She promptly scaled it, then turned around to look across the field of devastated asphalt.
"OK," she half-yelled after a few seconds, "it's gone. Let's get out of here before...anything shows up."
Cyborg walked in her general direction; carefully stepping on flat, large pieces of street amidst the small pieces of debris that were beginning to form a layer as he went. He imagined most of the world's post-pubescent population weighed more than Jinx did, and he was significantly heavier than most or all of them; those little pieces wouldn't support his mass. He had no idea how deep the stuff went, and crunching all the way to the bottom struck him as a particularly dumb way to find out. He had a mental recall of a scene in the Lord of the Rings movies, where Legolas was walking on top of the snow everyone else was trudging through.
He shook his head in an attempt to focus. "So, I can't say I've ever seen you do a lot of climbing," he commented to get his mind back on the immediate task. "Couldn't you, like, jump all the way up there?"
During the half-second of silence, Cyborg imagined she was giving him one of those skeptical looks. "Of course I could. How about you?"
He realized, at her prompting, that he hadn't thought far enough ahead to figure out how he was going to get out of this hole in the ground. Climbing up an irregular slope would be difficult enough since he only had one hand to use. "Oh yeah," he admitted. Then he sighed. "I tell ya, tonight has not been my best performance."
"Yeah, well, as hard as they've been trying to lock you down, it's not like you had a fair chance."
He reached the edge of the mound. Jinx's boots had made noticeable impressions in the softer portions of the mound, making it easy for him to see the solid pieces underneath. Another thing that would've been harder if she hadn't given the climb a trial run herself.
The climb itself was still rather painstaking. It was a repeated series of finding a piece of surface in arms' reach that could support his weight, brushing debris off the top of it, then grabbing it with his functional hand and pulling himself towards it enough to plant a foot on an intermediate piece of footing. The most difficult part, though, was not letting go when his gutted arm hit a surface and reignited the pain.
Once he finally reached the top, he bent over and took several deep breaths. On some level he was aware that the relief was only psychological, his mechanical musculature lacking the blood-oxygen reliance of organic muscles; but relief was relief, and he wasn't going to dispute it.
"Not to sound unsympathetic," Jinx said after a few seconds, "but we need to leave, like, already. Are you going to make it?"
Cyborg stood up straight, and took one more deep breath. "Yeah, but until I get my arm fixed I'd rather avoid trying to climb any more heaps like that one."
"How about stairs?"
He looked at her, and tried not to stare at her hair. "Stairs should be no problem. Haven't we been in enough tall buildings, though?"
She snorted. "I wish. But we're continually losing options."
Cyborg sighed. "Right, we can't afford to be picky."
"Best get moving, then. Come on," she said as she walked off, in the general direction of Titans Tower. "I have an idea where we can hide long enough for you to do your maintenance stuff."
"Alright," he said as he followed behind her, holding his nonfunctional arm with his functional one. "Hope that goes better than the rest of tonight, I'm sick of digging myself into deeper holes."
"You and me both."
"Like all this bear...stuff. What's a 'Green One', anyway?"
She turned to look at him over her shoulder. "That, I have an idea about..."