Cyborg fired his sonic cannon at the ursine intruder, hoping to catch it before it had a chance to move out of the doorway. Before the shot could connect, the bear did move out of the doorway, making a short jump to the center of the room.
Jinx, apparently expecting this move, tossed a hex where it landed. But it seemed to have expected that move, hopping away from the floor underfoot and charging towards her on all fours, with a deep snarl.
The creature was unable to dodge when she tossed the next hex straight at it, but the grunt of pain and the handful of purple arcs between the silver-tipped black bristles that made up its fur didn't stop it. Looking uncharacteristically panicked, she tried to leap past it rather than get plastered into the wall behind her.
The demon's left arm extended out to the side and swept upward; Jinx squealed in alarm when it knocked her legs out of its way, flipping her forward in mid-air and threatening to smash her head against the floor.
She managed to thrust her arms against the floor fast enough to avoid a cranial impact, and bent her knees to keep her outstretched legs from hitting the ceiling. Inertia carried her legs forward, and she landed on her feet; she grunted in pain, her bent knees being unable to distribute the force of impact away from her feet and ankles. Their opponent, meanwhile, had lost its balance during the maneuver and had fallen on its side.
"What are you waiting for?!" Jinx growled as she pushed herself into a standing position. He didn't need to ask what she meant, since the bear had already rolled back onto its feet and was charging at her again. Cyborg fired his sonic cannon at the creature.
The blue beam connected with its body, but the creature simply changed course towards him. He was peripherally aware of Jinx rolling away from the bear even though it wasn't aiming for her any longer.
He almost didn't notice it pushing itself onto two legs, because of the glare from his sonic cannon. He took a step back and pulled his arm away from the demon; he'd already received enough arm trauma for the night. The creature was still moving forward, though, and Cyborg couldn't move fast enough block the palm strike directed at his chest.
Cyborg grunted as the impact of the massive paw pushed him backward, ringing throughout his metal exoskeleton. He managed to stay standing, but the sensation was jarring enough that he instinctively shut his eyes from the pain. Which meant he didn't see the second blow coming only half a second later. Or the third. Or the fourth.
By then he'd adjusted to the feeling to a limited extent, and he tried to dodge out of the way of the next blow to catch his opponent off-balance. But all he managed to accomplish was to discover he'd been pushed back to the wall, literally; the wall halted his dodge before it had a chance to succeed. The ringing sensation wasn't as strong when he was rammed against the wall, but the direct sensation of pain was far worse.
Cyborg was vaguely aware of the barking sound, but the words in his head were clear.
"It does not need to be this way. Even the two of you can choose to serve the Green One without needless agony."
He assumed the wave of purple energy, coming in diagonally, represented Jinx's counteroffer. The beast hissed in response, before slamming Cyborg against the wall and quickly swiping its claws against his chest. The damage was negligible, though, and he figured that if the goal was to hurt him it'd go for the exposed flesh on his upper arms or face.
It wasn't until the three barks that he figured it out. With a rattling crystalline sound, he was suddenly encased in ice, the monster having just used his own body to hold the runes for its spell. He growled as he put effort into simply snapping the block open, but all he succeeded in doing was pressing his skin against the frigid material. He considered using one of his many arm attachments to simply cut through the ice, but if his parts got stuck mid-deployment he'd be without use of the arm entirely.
The ice was mostly clear, so he was able to see another purple flash of energy, the bear ducking under it and heading towards Jinx. He heard another bark, which was muffled in his ears but perfectly clear in his head. He didn't hear any words, though. Whatever quasitelepathy thing those bears used sure was weird...
He heard a reply bark, as Jinx stepped away from her pursuer, which stepped towards her in response. It also barked once more.
"Our ally will be here soon, and the metal man will join his compatriots in servitude," came the deep voice in his head again.
He watched, trying to think of a way out, while Jinx tried to toss another pair of hexes at the bear. It preempted her attack by taking an extra step forward almost faster than Cyborg could see, and then swatting her off to the side with a single swipe of its paw. Hitting the wall could not have been pleasant, but she stayed standing...and managed to jump off to the side, towards the door, as the bear lunged at her with a claw strike. It missed, but from Cyborg's view it was clear that the three claws of that paw had punctured the wall.
With a snarl it pulled the claws out of the wall, then turned towards him and barked.
"As for the girl, she can run if she likes. Let her crawl away like the worm she is."
He imagined the large flash of purple energy was another counteroffer from Jinx, and probably meant she'd heard that too. But he'd already wasted too much time watching the fight; he needed to get out of this frozen mess. He was too tightly packed in here for Jinx to blast him out without shattering him in the process, and he was doomed if the bear eviscerated the only free woman in the Tower. And straight-up physical conflict was not her forte.
He tried to destabilize the ice by shaking, which was pretty easy since the chilled air next to his skin made him want to shiver in the first place. It didn't seem to budge, but the shivering reminded him of the thermodynamic implication: If the ice was making him cold, he was making the ice warm. And the ice should melt or weaken eventually.
Wirelessly, he activated the heating elements in his room, as Jinx tried another few hexes to halt the bear's onslaught, to little effect. It was killing him, being this close to Jinx but unable to help her. All he was doing was trying to save himself by literally blowing hot air.
Not willing to wait idly for the ice to slowly melt, he tried pushing his elbows against the ice, and he felt like he overcame a slight bit of resistance, but ultimately it budged no more than a centimeter by his estimate. He pulled his elbows back, and was about to try thrusting his elbows outward to break the ice with sudden force, when a thought occurred to him: He had no way to buff the scratches out of his chest plate on short notice, so what would keep the demon from just barking him back into the ice as soon as he got out? A frown formed on his face, as he resolved to wait until he could pull an advantage out of a couple seconds...which almost certainly meant while the thing was distracted by Jinx.
The bear, pulling off acrobatics that would normally be impossible for a being for its size, jumped to the center of the room with a single bound, keeping Jinx from getting a clear shot or escaping. Or at least, that was probably its plan; Jinx, who routinely pulled off acrobatics normally impossible for a being her size, covered the distance to where the bear started from with two jumps, and tossed a hex at it while it was mid-air and unable to dodge. It roared as it landed, with purple sparks lighting its bristles, and turned on its hind legs to face Jinx.
And that's when Cyborg saw it: he'd evidently cleaned a vertical stripe of bristles off the thing's back with his sonic cannon earlier. Jinx must've hit the spot with a hex there as well; in the middle of the gray wood-textured stripe was a pulsating gash, black with white edges. It was a most unhealthy-looking sight, but the wound didn't seem to be slowing it down in the slightest.
So that was literally Cyborg's opening—maybe it just wasn't unhealthy enough.
His ursine target stepped towards the wall closest to Jinx on its hind legs, then took another step directly towards Jinx. She tossed a hex at the bear as she jumped away, but it was ready for her move; with some quick movement of its leg joints it leaped in the same general direction she was going, and the hex impacted fruitlessly on the wall. The creature made a wide swing with its left arm, claws extended. It swung too early, however, and the claws swiped through the air behind Jinx, instead of through her.
The bear quickly swung its arm back the other way, and managed to slam Jinx's side with the back of its paw. With a yell, she was knocked across the room, landing with a crash to Cyborg's left. Or at least, he assumed that's where she was; the skin on his face couldn't slip past the ice when he tried to look. He started applying moderate pressure against the ice with his elbows again, while the bear landed on its hind legs. It struggled to keep its balance for a couple seconds, then turned to face...where he thought Jinx was.
A couple coughs to his left confirmed his estimation of Jinx's location. "Got any brilliant ideas?" she asked raspily, while a couple high frequencies resonated through the ice next to his ears. He took a deep breath, and chose not to react to the obvious strain in Jinx's voice.
"Kind of," he responded, "but I'll need it close and facing away from me."
Their opponent barked as it approached at a casual pace.
"Fighting the inevitable only prolongs the agony of defeat. You should depart; your later loss in the name of the Green One will be painless, compared to what awaits you here."
"Just shut up," Jinx snarled under her breath, as she walked into Cyborg's line of sight and stood in front of him. The demon responded by hastening its pace into a charge. Cyborg pulled his arms back, hoping the ice had actually been weakened enough for him to break it, while Jinx halfheartedly tossed a hex at the bear without moving away from her position.
Cyborg had no way to know what the creature was expecting, but it clearly didn't expect Jinx to jump off directly to the side from a standing position, or it would have done more than just watch her. He was disappointed that he didn't get to see whatever preternatural agility she must've pulled off against the wall to land behind the bear. It was probably more impressive than losing her footing and tripping onto the floor, which Cyborg did see.
But more importantly, the bear was in range and had turned its back on Cyborg.
With determination, he thrust his elbows outward. The ice shattered, showering him with freezing particles but removing the entire volume of his frosted restraints. Deploying his missile launcher, he popped one unignited missile out each side, catching them both in his right hand. Arranging them between his thumb and forefinger, he charged forward with a yell as the bear looked over its shoulder at him.
He rammed the two missiles into the crack in the creature's back, just as it was swiveling on its hind legs to face him. The force of his hand hitting the creature wasn't enough to halt it, and it simply knocked him to the ground with a single kick to the chest.
The bear didn't seem to acknowledge the rapid beeping of his improvised time bombs. From his new vantage point, though, he could see Jinx roll away from the bear and cover her face with her arm.
Cyborg instinctively shut his eyes at the sudden burst of light. The boom of the explosion intermixed with a howl from the bear, and a splintering sound that reminded him of when movies showed a tall tree falling over in a forest.
When he opened his eyes, the sight was...alarming. Several strips of that wooden material were spread away behind the creature, to both the left and right. Their edges were warped and torn, and some droplets of a pulsing black substance stuck to them. It looked almost like some sort of demented wooden peacock.
Except for the distinctly ursine face, which now bore a look of unbridled fury. Cyborg hurriedly pushed himself back onto his feet, as the abomination in front of him took steps in his direction and raised a clawed arm into the air.
Jinx's yell was muffled by the intervening mass, but the flash of purple was unmistakable. The thing made a sound almost like a whimper, as purple sparks accompanied a splash of black fluid erupting behind it, but it still swung its arm downward. Cyborg, to keep the pattern going, yelled as he rammed his right fist into the monster's chest.
He heard the crunch as his fist punctured the material, mixed with a reverberating growl in every direction. The claws simply vanished, and the entire body of the bear turned into a puffy cloud of black fibers, which slowly floated into the metal floor and disappeared.
For the next few seconds, the only sound was Jinx's heavy breathing.
Then a bark rang out.
"Don't worry," Jinx said between breaths, "That's the other one."
He looked at her, sitting on the floor. "'Talking' to who?"
She looked back for a couple seconds. "Crap," she said as slowly got onto her feet.
"Are you OK?" Cyborg asked.
"I'm fine," Jinx answered dismissively.
Too dismissively, and too quickly, for Cyborg to believe her. "Are. You. O. K?" he demanded, frowning.
She frowned right back at him. Then she took a deep breath, then exhaled it in annoyance. "My bones are intact, I'm not bleeding, and I didn't hit my head on anything. I'll be fine."
"Well excuse me for being worried about you after some monster that survived literally being blown open was hitting you across the room a couple times!"
She quickly shook her head. "Look, we don't have time for this right now."
As if on cue, a low boom filled the air, and a bright light flickered in front of him. What appeared was...something he couldn't explain. A small circular section of the wall had been...replaced, with a matted set of yellow roots. It was a perfectly clean circular shape too: there were no roots outside it, nor was any of the wall's metal inside it. And it was slowly getting bigger. A soft red light glowed through tiny gaps in the root-wall, but nothing in the room was illuminated by it.
"Uh...what is that?" Cyborg asked, as Jinx turned around to look at it herself.
"Frick if I know," she answered in annoyance. "Isn't Ops in that direction?"
"...it is. I bet this...stuff...is what shut off the security in there, growing like we guessed."
"It might be some kind of dimensional overlap, and cut the cameras off from the rest of the security system. Which means I'm not hanging around to see if cuts us. Let's go."
She briskly walked past him, headed straight for the doorway. Without any expression of pain, or any sort of limp to suggest nursing a wound. If she wasn't as uninjured as she claimed, well, she was too good at hiding it for Cyborg to detect.
He turned to follow her, and discovered she had stopped just outside the doorway, staring off to the left. He leaned out past the ice-assaulted hole in the wall to see what had gotten her attention.
Some distance past where his room ended, that dimensional stuff extended into the hallway, covering its whole width for several dozen feet. As before, the walls were replaced with some sort of roots, and the air had a red glow to it. The floor and ceiling, though, were a solid layer of yellow wood inside the...he was pretty sure now that it wasn't just a circular region, but a spherical one. And the red glow appeared to come from the air itself.
Most interestingly, the roots laying along the floor that he had to step around to get into his room in the first place...weren't present inside the sphere.
He heard an odd, uncomfortably familiar, high-pitched sound behind him. He quickly turned around, just in time to see a short, but wide, rectangular object flying through the air at them, encased in solid black energy.
Jinx ducked under it quicker than he did, but they both avoided being hit by it. From below he saw the short legs at each corner of its underside; identifying the object as a bed, mattress and all. Cyborg imagined a bed was easy to find, with the bedrooms so close by, but he had bigger concerns than the choice of projectile. Specifically, the projector.
Floating in the air at the end of the hall was Raven, with the glowing blue eyes indicative of the rampant mind control he'd seen tonight. Below her, near the wall, stood a small marionette with a tiny crown on his head...
"It really is the Puppet King?" Cyborg said in disbelief. "Since when do you go with gourds?"
"Oh, I have new friends now," the Puppet King replied; his slow, creepily distant voice echoing down the hall. "The plants are theirs to command. And their Great Pumpkin gives them many, many more puppets."
The bigger pumpkin is their mind control hub too, Cyborg thought to himself; good to know.
"No matter," the Puppet King continued. "Adding you will complete our collection of your friends. But she is unnecessary."
She quickly jumped to her feet with a snarl, and Cyborg stood up at the same time. "Why you worthless worm-ridden—"
She cut her retort short when Puppet Raven telekinetically picked up a pile of thick-looking books. He ducked back into his room before the literary salvo hit, with Jinx shortly behind.
"I saw the bed pass the dimensional boundary unharmed," Jinx said, "so we can get out that way."
"And then what?" Cyborg asked.
Jinx took a deep breath. "I'll keep them from going after you, while you get rid of their 'Great Pumpkin'."
"I am not leaving you with them by yourself!"
"Yeah you are," Jinx declared dismissively. "We can't hold out while they've got the rest of the city mind controlled; and we can't fight three pumpkins and Raven in a wide open space so we need to split them up." She sighed. "And I had to take down Mammoth earlier, I won't ask you to do the same to Raven," she added quietly.
Puppet Raven floated through the door. Cyborg didn't have an opportunity to respond though; Jinx delivered an uppercut to her face, then kicked her back into the hallway. He couldn't recall Jinx ever punching anyone before.
"We don't have time!" she growled. "You go make the pie; I'll take care of the Wicked Bitch of the West."
"...how long have you been saving that one?"
"GO!"