2.2
In 23.73 microseconds of computation, the Halutian planning brain steering Icho Tolot's body came to the result that protecting the cape who could fire devastating bolts at Leviathan was a new priority, one that was strongly connected to the optimum survival rate of the human population of Boston.
Checking its options, the biological computer dismissed a direct intervention - Leviathan was already in the building holding the female with the crossbow, while the Halutian form was still enclosed by energy shields, and generally limited in its jumping ability, at least compared to the feat the Endbringer had just performed with his leap of up to 100 feet.
Using the tinkertech armband it had obtained from Myrddin was also eliminated from the list of alternatives, simply because the planning brain had - due to combat circumstances - never received any instructions on the device's use.
Finding out by trial and error would be as task of a few minutes at most, but time was of the essence in this case.
That left only one effective choice: verbal communication.
Luckily, the Halutian body was equipped with a respirational and vocal system that was up to the task, even against the howling of a massive storm and the sounds of crunching concrete Leviathan's destructive climb through the upper floors of the high rise produced.
After taking an especially deep breath, Icho Tolot's body performed an act that had burst or at least injured countless eardrums before - it simply used its voice.
"Leviathan targets the crossbow girl! Take her from the roof!" the Halutian bellowed, his shouted words so powerful that the capes who were near him, Legend among them, could not only hear him - very well indeed - but could even feel slight vibrations in the air, caused by Tolot's extreme bass.
The planning brain observed in satisfaction as the already happening evacuation of the rooftop accelerated even further, and two flyers who had been close to the young cape with the archaic weapon approached her simultaneously.
At first, she had stumbled backwards from the balustrade in shock when she heard Tolot's words, which had obviously been audible even at her position, 200 feet above the ground, but then she caught on quickly, and began to run towards her rescuers.
From one moment to the next, the energy fields around the Halutian flickered and died, given up as useless by the shielders from Myrddin's group, who had more pressing matters to attend to anyway.
Tolot's massive form began to push through the flooded street towards the high rise instantly, the planning brain intent on getting into position to engage the enemy once again.
In the meantime, the airspace around the building took on the look of a hornets nest that someone had poked with a stick, with capes darting in every direction, many of them carrying those that couldn't save themselves.
Legend and Alexandria - who had apparently recovered quickly from her collision with Leviathan's massive tail - joined the efforts of the other parahumans.
Racing forward, grabbing someone, and depositing them on other rooftops looked effortless for the two triumvirs, a huge contrast to many of the other flyers.
In an explosion of debris and the spray of his afterimage, Leviathan burst through the roof, his grotesquely deformed, ichor covered head snapping in one, his lethal tail in the other direction, eager to kill all who stood in his way.
He was greeted by a bombardment from several blasters who were hovering high above him and tried to cover the retreat, but the monster simply ignored their attacks, more interested in finding his elusive pray.
As far as the planning brain could tell from its position, the roof had been cleared just in the nick of time though, denying Leviathan the chance to strike the sniper-cape down.
It'd taken the two parahumans who'd approached her a few moments to coordinate with her and each other, but at the time Leviathan arrived on the scene, they were already in the air, speeding away from the roof in an awkward but steady formation.
As if catching their scent, the Endbringer tore towards the roof's rim in a swinging gait much less graceful than his movement over water, but still blindingly fast.
"Chance of Leviathan catching priority protectee within parameters of observed jump capabilities: 13%", the planning brain calculated, but in the next second, its careful assessment was proven worthless.
Instead of lunging from the roof in pursuit, the Endbringer used the momentum he had gathered for something entirely new - his claws, closed into massive fists, hit the balustrade with enormous power, shattering it and flinging a dense cloud of debris away from the impact, like pellets fired from a shotgun.
Most of the improvised attack missed the trio of fleeing capes, who were more than 100 feet away, but one shrapnel hit the female cape's crossbow, throwing it from her grasp.
She reacted instinctively and tried to grasp her weapon, but it was already plunging towards the ground, and her flailing destabilized the whole flying ensemble.
Their airspeed dwindled rapidly and both flyers fought desperately to regain the balance they had before.
Deep down beneath them, the Halutian planning brain sprang into action.
Tolot's body rushed towards a wrecked car that had been thrown into the third floor facade of the high rise, and ripped the driver side door away with contemptuous ease, as if it was opening a tin can.
While its central eye kept the struggle high above in focus, the other two watched on as Tolot's powerful hands tore the whole driver's seat out of the vehicle in one piece.
On the rooftop, Leviathan was hit by an intense salvo of Legend's red and violet lasers from behind, and half a second later, an onrushing Alexandria struck her fist into the Endbringer's back with enough force to topple the monster from it's precarious position on the edge.
It looked as if every chance to hurt the crossbow-sniper had been abruptly taken from Leviathan, but as gravity pulled his hulking frame forward into the abyss, he revealed one last card to play.
His enormous right arm shot forward in a wide circular arc, and a huge piece of concrete that had been hidden inside, shot out of his hand.
Like a biological staff sling, the Endbringer's arm accelerated the projectile into a nearly straight ballistic curve towards the flying trio, who had just regained their equilibrium.
The cape on the right, a man wearing a lightly armored suit painted in all the colors of the rainbow, had been looking back towards Leviathan, saw the new attack, and in a split-second, with a truly heroic act, he twisted his body, and interposed himself between the onrushing block and its target.
He paid for his bravery dearly when the shot hit home, the visible denting of the plates over his chest suggesting severe injury.
Losing his grip on the now crossbowless crossbow-sniper, the stricken cape tumbled away in agony, leaving the one on the left, a short person, who might've been as young as the girl he carried, to the task of holding both him and his passenger afloat.
Judging by his terrible performance, his power had never been intended for supporting more than his own weight - he kept hold of the girl, but their trajectory lost any semblance of controlled flight, and turned into a barely decreased plunge towards the ground.
In reaction to this emergency, the planning brain performed a last microsecond scan of the situation, taking in all actors and their movements on the battlefield, then it catapulted itself upwards along the building's front face.
Moving like this forced it to restructure the Halutian frame once again, massively reducing the form's weight, and that in turn necessitated a transformation of the ordinary brain too, because a clump of super dense and exceedingly heavy metal couldn't exist inside a body otherwise made from meat, or at least not without very unfortunate results.
Thus, Taylor was once again thrown into a situation she was totally ignorant of, going from a state that could be compared to brain death to ultrahigh synaptic activity in less than a second.
"Ahhhhhhh!" she screamed internally, as their shared body rocketed up, absurdly holding a car seat in the iron grasp of their left upper hand.
Through their eyes, she saw the sky filled with capes, but her attention was swiftly pulled to the giant figure of Leviathan falling directly towards them.
"Are you insane! We can't hit Leviathan like this!" Taylor berated Icho Tolot, fear for her at the moment quite vulnerable brain surging through her, but the Halutian being ignored her, and simply kept calculating angles and speeds.
They reached the apex of their jump, 60 feet above ground, and the planning brain rammed both right fists into the facade of the building, grasping the internal steel girder it had aimed for.
While Taylor was uselessly protesting and metaphorically shaking in her boots, the planning brain executed the second part of their movement.
Their lower body was reeled inside the building, secured a strong stance, and pushed away again with the might of Halutian muscles, the whole sequence completed with perfect body control and without so much as a slip or fumbling in less than two seconds.
As they were shooting out- and upwards, Taylor registered their eyes focussing on a pair of capes who were dropping like a stone.
When Tolot held out the car seat in front of them with the upholstery facing up, Taylor was strongly reminded of a baseball outfielder lunging to catch the ball with his glove, and she finally understood what was happening.
Perfectly timed, as Taylor was coming to expect from Tolot, they intercepted the pair of falling capes, and with a heavy impact, the slender body of a young woman slammed into the car seat, while the cape who had tried - and spectacularly failed - to hold her in the air, grazed by and disappeared below.
The parahuman they'd caught was screaming incoherently, and flailed her arms and legs around, obviously not understanding that she'd been saved from pancaking on the floodwaters.
Her erratic movements forced their body to press her into the seat with the other upper, or "action arm", as the pair of extremities was known in Halutian physiology.
Their flight path dipped at a high angle after their momentum had spent itself, and they dropped towards the roof of a lower building, accelerated by gravity.
Tolot pulled the car seat towards their chest and curled up around it and the female cape in a protective shell, then Taylor felt her thoughts slow down once again as parts of her brain underwent the change, one she had anticipated this time.
The Halutian body smashed into the platform roof like a bullet tearing through a paper target, and even the floors below couldn't break their fall.
They only came to a halt in the first flooded story, and Tolot unfolded quickly in order to get their protectee over the water's surface.
The young cape hung in the seat like a drenched and broken rag doll, scantly conscious and bleeding from her mouth.
Her wide eyes, barely visible through the visor covering them, were bloodshot and glassy, probably the first signs of a concussion.
There would be other injuries too after this kind of fall and impact - the girl had been as secure as possible given the circumstances, but a car seat and Tolot's steely body were no adequate replacement for what had really been needed here - a fire brigades's jumping pillow.
As soon as Taylor's ability to think returned fully, her heart went out to the young cape, pity and concern climaxing all other considerations and emotions.
"Get us out of here, we must bring this girl to a healer!" she demanded.
"Positive," was Tolot's only reply before they started to move in the surprisingly graceful, rapid fluidity seemingly typical for Halutians while they were in a mostly untransformed state.
First, they went up to the next floor to get out of the water, then they shot down a corridor until they reached a window that gave them a view of the outside.
About 170 to 180 feet away, Leviathan had hit the ground, still ready to fight of course, and was currently engaging against Alexandria and a massive cape Taylor identified as New Wave's Manpower, with Legend and a few other blasters backing them up.
As they stood there and stared at the scene, the wounded girl in their arms steered.
"My crossbow, need by crossbow..." she muttered in a thin voice that would've been unintelligible to everyone without Tolot's excellent hearing.
"You will get it back, my little one," Tolot reassured her in a soft, only slightly rumbling tone that stood in fundamental contrast to his horrific exterior.
"You know, this mothering act is going to creep her out more than it's helping." Taylor informed her mindscape's second inmate cattishly, more than a bit peeved that the Halutian had never bothered with such a treatment when dealing with her.
Ignoring her remark, Tolot continued to placate the injured cape, producing sounds that came close to cooing, if the soft rhythmical sounds he uttered could ever fittingly be described by that word, given that they were coming from a killing machine of his proportions.
The young cape in their arms reacted positively to Tolot's verbal comfort, and in moments, she gathered herself enough to open an emergency channel on her radio.
"Thisisssh Flechet, 'm wounded and need 'gent pickup," she slurred with a heavy tongue.
"Acknowledged, Flechette, a teleporter will be dispatched to your position ASAP." the crisp voice of the operator answered her a second later, audible to Tolot's fine senses even from inside the girl's mask.
Taylor felt her worry lift slightly at that, but as she stared out at Leviathan, who had just flung Manpower into a wall with lethal force, she wondered if the transport would even arrive in time for the young girl in their arms, who was apparently known as "Flechette".
Taylor had never heard that name before today, but that was probably true for most capes in the fight and regardless, the fact that Tolot couldn't effectively fight while they had to care for the injured cape was much more pressing.
"While we wait, you could give me a rundown of what happened when we attacked." Taylor requested, mostly to distract herself from her fears.
"Icho Tolot's ramming maneuver and subsequent attack went well initially, but the enemy is an even harder target than your memories indicated. Destroying his eyes was ineffectual as well."
She wanted to ask how their rescue of Flechette had started, but Leviathan interrupted her train of thought by hammering Alexandria into the foaming water with a head butt, before darting away from the battle … towards their position.
"Oh fuck!" Flechette mumbled as she saw the monster close in, and Taylor could only agree.
The Halutian on the other hand wasted no time on useless curses, but reacted by simply tearing away from their observation spot on all four running limbs, directed only by the need to keep as much distance between them and the Endbringer as possible.
They crashed through a window, with the wounded cape pressed to their chest, and the bottom side of the car seat protecting her back from the shards and splinters exploding in all direction.
While they were in midair, Taylor discovered that Tolot had aimed for a window in the next building over, and concluded that the being driving their body wanted to keep away from the floodwaters.
"Correct, denying the enemy his most useful advantage is crucial to protect Flechette."
They slammed through the glass pane and into the next building, and Tolot deployed his central eye once again on its stalk, raising it high enough that they could use it for getting a view of what was happening behind them.
Leviathan had closed in on them, but his movements seemed to be much more unsteady than before, his speed was also lower.
"The water level is sinking around him." Tolot observed clinically, and indeed, when they reached the end of the building they were currently traversing, they spotted a brightly glowing Eidolon above them in the sky.
An enormous tornado of water and spray was rotating below the third Triumvir, connecting him with the approaching figure of Leviathan, who had started to look reluctant and unsettled for the first time since the battle had started.
From behind, Legend and the blasters with him resumed their attacks on the Endbringer, destabilizing his stance further, and Alexandria was gearing up for a new attack as well, this time from behind and above.
"Eidolon is sucking away the water Leviathan is standing on, possibly the afterimage too." Tolot said analytically.
"Yeah, and it's working!" Taylor shouted, making up for the Halutian's coolness with her own enthusiasm.
They crashed through the next window, and suddenly, a heavily armored figure appeared a dozen yards in front of them, giving Tolot just enough time to slow down before he trampled the teleporter underfoot.
They stretched out the car seat containing Flechette towards him, but the transport-cape ignored the gesture, and in the next moment, they found themselves on a paved, water free parking lot that belonged to a massive and still undamaged hospital.
"Leave the arrival zone!" their teleporter demanded curtly, and gestured imperiously to the buildings entrance area, where a frenzied triage effort was underway.
"It seems following orders in indicated." Tolot said, and their massive form moved forward, towering above everyone around.
It was a chaotic scene, dominated by the pain filled cries and shouts of the wounded and the hasty chatter of the medical personal attending them.
Many of the stretchers used to hold the injured were stained with blood or other bodily fluids Taylor didn't want to think about.
As they searched for Panacea or one of the very few other healers Taylor could remember, Flechette still in their arms, they spotted a tall figure in powerarmor leaving the hospital, carrying a sturdy tinkertech halberd over his shoulder.
2.3
"That's Armsmaster." Taylor whispered inside their mind, her inner voice tinted by the long held awe she had for the Protectorate hero, and forgetting that Tolot had access to her very memories.
The tall and muscular cape, leader of the Brockton Bay Protectorate, and one of the most famous tinkers in the whole country, passed the throng of civilians and hospital staff towards them, flowing through small and short lived gaps without jolting anyone.
"Interesting," Tolot commented, "his reaction time is vastly superior to the average human and the armor's design features indicate heavy miniaturization on a scale comparabale to Siganese work..."
Taylor didn't listen to the boring technical analysis the Halutian was going on about though - to her, Armsmaster was the model of a hero, even more so than Myrddin, maybe because she had seen him on their local TV station, in countless Brockton Bay settings she'd been to herself, like the Boardwalk or the levitating Protectorate HQ in the harbor.
She remembered a day not that long ago, when she'd spend all of her allowance money on a set of Armsmaster themed underwear, an impulsive act Emma had mercilessly teased her about at their last slumber party.
If she could've done so in her current form, she would've blushed all over again, just as she'd done then.
With a lot of effort, she pushed the memory away.
They couldn't move through the crowd as elegantly as Armsmaster, due to the enormous breadth of their form, but keeping him in sight and finally blocking his way was easy enough.
He stopped only a few paces in front of them, dwarfed by their body even in his seven feet tall bulky suite of powerarmor.
People began to flow around them, and in seconds, they had a small island of calm for themselves inside the stream of hurrying humanity.
"Greetings, Armsmaster!" Tolot rumbled, not very loudly for a Halutian, but still with enough volume to make many people who hadn't seen their approach turn around and gape at them with shocked expressions.
Taylor for her part wasn't thinking about the impression their hulking, dark and powerful frame would have on any onlookers.
She was jumping up and down in their mindscape, excited despite all that had happened to her to actually speak with Armsmaster.
The hero didn't reply at once, but stood stiffly in his place while he eyed their body openly.
His lips pressed together into a thin, disapproving line when he spotted Flechette in their arms, and suddenly, Taylor felt quite deflated, before even a word had been uttered by her favorite parahuman.
"You must be Icho Tolot, the supertough mons..., eh brute, who somehow managed to fool Dragon's latest generation of nanosensors into declaring himself dead." Armsmaster said after what seemed like a long time to Taylor, his tone clipped and flat, very different from the resonant rich voice she remembered from countless press conferees.
"Icho Tolot had no intentions to fool anyone, sir." the Halutian corrected him politely.
"And still you did so, embarrassing the best tinker in the world, and now you are hindering me in performing my pressing duties, while at the same time depriving a Ward of the medical care she desperately needs." Armsmaster shot back in irritation, and pointed at the semiconscious Flechette in what could be only described as a gesture of condemnation.
"Icho Tolot begs you pardon," the Halutian said humbly, "but he judged it imperative to meet you as soon as you were spotted. Icho Tolot is in urgent need of a melee weapon, and knows that you always carry a duplicate of your halberd into Endbringer battles."
With quickly growing trepidation, Taylor saw Armsmaster's jaw muscles bulge as he clenched his mouth shut.
This was not going well.
"Might Icho Tolot borrow your reserve halberd for the purpose of bringing the fight to Leviathan?" the planning brain completed their request, but Taylor already knew that they'd botched it by what she could see of the cape's expression.
"You don't only look like a killing machine, but you are a brazen individual too." Armsmaster pressed out angrily.
Before they could reply, he lifted the halberd from his shoulder in a swift movement, and brought it into what Tolot identified as a "Lower Outside Guard" position, with the blade close to the ground on the left side of the hero, pointing towards them, and ready to strike.
The deserted area around them grew instantly, and people began to mutter in fear and irritation about the "idiotic posturing" of the two capes in their midst.
"Icho Tolot is not interested in fighting you, only in acquiring a weapon." the Halutian tried to placate the hero.
"I don't know you from the Siberian, you could be a villain who's only in this fight to get his hands on my technology! It would violate at least six different PRT regulations to give you my weapon." Armsmaster spat in heated indignation.
"Now, get Flechette to a healer and move out of my way," he went on, "or I will interpret your behavior as a violation of the Endbringer truce!"
The planning brain conducted one of its high-speed calculations, and reached the conclusion that actually fighting Armsmaster to take his duplicate halberd would be counterproductive in the short as well as in the long run.
They stepped aside, and the hero walked past, keeping them in view for the whole time, with his weapon at the ready.
"That went terrible! You just antagonized the Protectorate leader of the city I live in!" Taylor wailed at Tolot as soon as Armsmaster had disappeared in the still downpouring rain.
She felt as if someone had just ripped her heart out, only to trample on it with malicious glee.
"His posture and inflection indicated that he was irritated even before Icho Tolot addressed him." the Halutian countered while they were already moving again, in search for a healer.
"Yeah, but that doesn't change the fact that we didn't get the weapon we need, and also made an enemy out of Armsmaster!" Taylor ranted, stricken much more by her not-so-secret schoolgirl crush's coarse behavior than by their failure to convince him to hand over his reserve halberd.
They parted the masses of people around them like a battleship driving through a flotilla of sailing boats, and entered the hospital seconds later without further incidents.
The inside was much more organized than the triage area, with the tried and tested duties and procedures holding up to the strain they were under.
"Could you help Icho Tolot, please?" they asked the obviously stressed middle aged woman at the reception, who looked up at them with wide, frightened eyes, as if they were about to eat her for dinner.
She only managed to nod once, her pupils focused on their forms' rows of long and very sharp teeth.
"The Ward Flechette needs urgent healing in order to rejoin the fight - where is Panacea?"
Without taking her focus from their mouth, the woman pointed towards their left.
"Just down that corridor and through the third door to the left."
They thanked her in the least threatening grumble their body could produce, and marched off quickly to find the best healer of the continent, if not the world. 2.4
Bent over to fit through the human sized door, which was adorned with the prosaic words "Staff Cantina", the body of Icho Tolot entered the large room the hospital's frightened receptionist had pointed them to.
More than three dozen capes were spread out on the linoleum floor in two long rows of stretchers, most of them unconscious, but others in such agony that their screaming and crying filled the air with a cacophony of misery.
A few nurses and doctors were around, taking measurements and supplying the injured with infusions, but they had the appearance and demeanor of helpers, constantly turning towards and calling questions to one small person in their midst.
It was Panacea - Taylor recognized her immediately, of course.
She was dressed in her famous costume, a hooded white robe which had massive red crosses on the front and the back alike.
The lower half of her face was hidden behind a scarf, despite the fact that her identity as Amy Dalon was well known to the public, due to the failed "unmasking" philosophy of the "New Wave" team.
Panacea was kneeling beside the newest of Leviathan's cape victims, one who had been placed only twenty feet from the entrance, because the available space in the room was nearly exhausted already.
The healers slender right hand was touching the wounded cape's cheek above the American flag masking her, getting the skin contact she needed for her power to work.
"Oh no, that's Miss Militia!" Taylor shouted inside their mindscape, filled by horrified surprise that the Brockton Bay heroine, who was beloved by everyone in the city, from little girls to militant feminists, had been hurt enough to need Panacea to heal her.
"This explains Armsmaster's presence here, as well as his negative emotional state - probability 84 percent." Tolot said with his usual passionless certainty.
"Yeah, looks like we got a bad break there." Taylor agreed, torn between sympathy for Miss Militia and relieve that her bitter disappointment at the halberd wielding hero's hostile behavior was already fading in face of this new revelation.
"We have to pay more attention to those transmissions, if we'd done so we could've started on the right foot with Armsmaster."
Neither she nor Tolot had listened closely to the stream of "down" and "deceased" announcements coming from Dragon's armband, mostly because they were concentrating on the fight and didn't know the mentioned names anyway, but also, in Tolot's case, because the information "lacked tactical value".
As far as Taylor could tell from the blindingly fast calculations she felt through their mental connection, the Halutian considered the rolling casualty list to be a "highly inefficient" method of battlefield communication, because everyone mentioned in the transmissions was treated following the same "simplistic categories", despite the fact that the effects of their powers on Leviathan and their combat experience varied greatly.
"You will surely invent a new system as soon as the fight is over, if it's that easy, right?" Taylor asked ironically, offended that Tolot would disparage Dragon and her tinkertech so casually.
"Priority on improving procedure in question: low. A detailed list of short- and midterm goals with higher importance is available."
"Arrghhh! Let's just concentrate on the present, ok?"
While their inner "talk" took place with the speed of thought, their hulking Halutian frame was already approaching Panacea with quick strides of their massive legs, causing noticeable vibrations of the floor and dull *Thump! Thump!* sounds in the air.
Without warning, a figure that had been hidden behind a hospital curtain in the far corner of the canteen entered their field of view, and shot towards them through the air, the enormous speed of her passage ruffling hair and clothes of wounded and doctor's alike.
The new arrival, a statuesque blonde girl, came to a stop right in front of them, standing upright in the air with her hands on her hips, and blocking their way with a rather haughty expression on her pretty features.
"That's Glory Girl ... Panacea's ... wonderful sister." Taylor stuttered, overwhelmed by a wave of awe that was even stronger than what she had felt when meeting Armsmaster.
"Attention: mind altering influence detected. Status of ordinary brain: already decoupled from body control." Tolot informed her.
Taylor ignored him in favor of taking in the appearance of her new favorite parahuman.
The teenager wore a white one-piece dress that came to mid-thigh, and an archetypical cape flowing down her back, with high boots and a golden tiara in her shining hair rounding off the picture of a stereotypical 50s super heroine.
"Put the wounded down there -" Glory Girl demanded in a superior tone before they could even introduce themselves, and pointed to an empty stretcher on the floor "and kindly leave the way you came. It's already a madhouse in here without you scaring everyone and damaging the floor!"
Tolot bowed forward to check the flooring, and found to Taylor's dismay that they'd left deep dents in the linoleum.
They reminded Taylor of the fossilized dinosaur tracks she'd seen only three days ago, when her youth camp group had visited the Amherst College museum of natural history.
Ashamed of their brontosaurian clumsiness, Taylor felt the strong urge to follow Glory Girl's command, but the Halutian that was sharing her body overruled her without one iota of compassion.
"The Ward Flechette is needed for successfully conducting the battle, her power is a highly potent weapon against Leviathan." Tolot explained rumblingly, and took another step in the direction of Panacea.
"I really don't care who she is, I'm here to keep people like you off my sister's back, and that's what I'm gonna do, if you like it or not." the heroine also known under her real name of "Victoria Dalon" declared steadfastly, not backing down an inch, despite the fact that the Halutian form towered over her, even while she was in flight.
"Flechette's projectiles are able to penetrate the whole of Leviathan's body. Her injuries are a result of the Endbringer's retaliatory attack after she shot a bolt through his head."
"That's quite impressive, I'm sure, but Panacea will deal with all the wounded in her own time and on her own terms!" Glory Girl snarled, making Taylor wish that she could just turn and run away.
The New Wave cape took a more threatening posture, balling her hands to fists and raising them to chest height, obviously ready to rush the Halutian body at a moments notice.
All of that didn't deter Icho Tolot, of course.
"It's imperative that Flechette returns to the fight without delay. A cost-benefit equation between her power and that of Miss Militia indicates a utility differentiation of more than 850 percent in Flechette's favor."
"Now listen carefully, you monster!" Glory Girl screamed angrily, and closed in until she was less than a foot away from their face.
"If you think for a second that my sister gives a damn about your so called "equation", than you better..."
"Stop this, Victoria!" a pleading voice interrupted the tirade.
It was Panacea, who had stood up beside Miss Militia's litter, and was staring at them, her eyes giving the impression of equal amounts of exhaustion and wariness.
"But Ames, didn't you hear what this cold hearted bastard said?" Victoria Dalon whined indignantly.
"I've stabilized Miss Militia, I can regrow her arm after I take a look at this girl." Panacea said firmly, coming towards them with swift steps that couldn't fully hide the fatigue she was feeling.
"Greetings, Panacea. This form's name is Icho Tolot." the Halutian introduced them politley, and Taylor's focus shifted from the reluctantly retreating Glory Girl to her more diminutive sister.
Panacea ignored Tolot's words, and concentrated on the by now fully unconscious Ward they were holding in their arms.
She touched the fingers of Flechette's right hand and closed her eyes, intently watched by the three red ones of the Halutian body.
"Panacea's healing ability is very interesting to Icho Tolot - depending on its function and versatility, it could be used for many purposes, including upgrading the average human physique to Oxtornian levels of power and endurance." Tolot said internally, while they stared at the quickly improving hue of Flechette's visible skin.
"Don't be ridiculous!" Taylor replied. "If Panacea could change normal people to whatever "Oxtornian levels" are, she would do so all the time. She's a great healer, but still limited - I once heard that she can't even heal brain injuries."
"The fact that Flechette - who possesses the only power Icho Tolot has observed actually hurting the enemy - was put on the battlefield without any sort of armor to protect her, as well as the dysfunctional communication system in use, casts doubt on the competence of parahumans and their organizations to use their power to maximum effect. There may be other factors, social or political, in play: insufficient data."
It took only a minute before Panacea opened her eyes again and looked up into their face.
"She has a concussion I can't do anything about, but her broken ribs, damaged vertebrae and the light internal bleeding in her right lung have been dealt with, as well as several extensive hematoma. You should wake her up in five minutes, when all effects of my healing have settled, and keep her awake after that."
"Thank you, Panacea. Icho Tolot hopes to speak with you again."
The young cape stared at them for a moment, her brow creased in angry disapproval.
"Don't think that I share your utilitarian stance regarding the worth of wounded people just because I helped Flechette." she told them frostily, and turned around sharply, her robe billowing around her.
The quick movement proved to be too much for the fatigued girl's balance though, and she stumbled and fell with a shriek of surprise and fear.
Icho Tolot shot forward with lightning speed, and grabbed the healer around her torso, caught her fall with ease and put her down on her feet again.
Obviously unsettled from the shock of falling and her tiredness, the healer gripped Tolot's arm with both hands to steady herself.
Panacea froze in her position, and her eyes went wide.