Jack reached out and snatched Bonesaw by the hand and fled down one of the side tunnels that radiated from the tunnel. The Druid lunged into motion, producing a handful of razor-sharp knives and hurling them backhanded. Bonesaw took one to the back of each of her knees, and she stumbled even as Jack turned at the last moment and swung his own knife, cutting the other two out of the air. He snatched the girl up while the Protectorate exploded into motion. "Oni Lee, get Crawler!" Danny's voice called out.

And then a flood of naked, deformed bodies burst out of the side passages. Grotesque lumps covered their heads and bodies, misshapen limbs limped strongly along. The first wave bore the features of Ravager and Trickster amid the disfigurements and deformities, and absolute chaos broke out. Dozens of teleporters swapped places with the heroes, separating them and trying to bear them down by sheer strength of numbers. Ravagers clawed at armor, and smoke rose from the growing gouges as the advanced armor was etched by a burning corruption. One Trickster took a flying leap towards Noelle, and traded places with Shatterbird at the last second, pitching her headfirst into the quicksand-flesh of the trapped behemoth.

Oni Lee teleported rapidly, ringing Crawler in a noose of explosions that chewed away the hardened flesh and knocked its myriad legs out from under it. He struck between the monochrome pulses, only teleporting when the massive monster was vulnerable. He concentrated on the creature's midpoint, behind the second set of shoulders, and alternated explosions with slashes from his nano-saw batons. Flesh boiled away to thick greasy smoke, leaving cuts three inches wide and a few feet deep. He pressed harder, slipped himself inside the Siberian-shell and began cutting deep, cutting through. Crawler bellowed as it was carved in half, its body twitching as it began regrowing the lost mass, new legs sprouting from ballooning flesh. But Oni kept going, not slowing, his batons now cutting into the wound and working deep, now intent on quartering the Crawler he had halved. One of Crawler's newly-grown tentacles had a nano-saw sheath on it, and it lashed back against Oni Lee to cut him as he had cut it. But the force-field armor repelled the nanites, leaving him safe. The creature's regrowth was slowed and stifled, working to overcome the Butcher's power to create wounds that spread instead of healing. The Crawler almost wasn't strong enough to regenerate at all, and it could feel itself on the losing end of this battle. A maniacal assassin was inside its body, suppressing its regeneration power, and carving it apart from the inside using weapons that destroyed everything they touched. So the Crawler had to get smart: it began dragging its failing body towards the mad thing in the wall.

Dauntless flew up to blast lightning at the monstrous misshapen malcontents, but his own team was mixed in and positions were constantly shifting, the teleporters were screwing with everything. He found himself back on the ground again, and he quickly took flight again only to be grounded again. Battery shared a glance with Assault, and they nodded. She charged up her powers, and threw a massive haymaker straight at the Trickster in front of her. He swapped himself for Assault, and she struck him with all her power while he was ready to absorb and redirect it. He turned into a dervish, a buzzsaw of punches and kicks that whirled through twenty monsters before he slowed down. Vista found her power all but shut off, the presence of living people limited her ability and this room was nearly packed wall to wall. But her armor was still power armor, and she started punching at naked bodies, using a pair of metal fists with glowing red-hot brass knuckles built in. Clockblocker was restricting the enemy's movements, freezing every cancerous creature he got his hands on. He made his way towards the tunnels, looking to cut off the tide of reinforcements. Flechette was in a bad way, her power was world-class for assassinating hard targets like Leviathan, but not so great against a horde of naked maniacs. She didn't have an unlimited supply of bolts, and she couldn't just fire them into a mass of bodies unless she could be positive that none of the heroes were mixed in with them. Velocity had his back to a corner and was using a nano-saw baton to dismember any monster that came at him. A Trickster teleported him out of the corner and he quickly wove his way back, cutting down mutants between him and the nearest wall. Browbeat thrashed his way through the crowd, Ravager claws raking against the force field he projected but not even penetrating to his super-alloy armor, this was the sort of fight he thrived in. Benthic sprayed a barrage of mini-containment-foam-grenades to bind up the mutants, and followed it up with shocking punches that transferred the voltage from her target to everything bound to him with foam.

The Druid vaulted over the wall of bound monsters and grabbed Benthic under her arms, leaping up and away with easy grace. The boots tapped once, twice, on the back of Crawler's dismembered hindquarters, and then skipped lightly across the heads, shoulders, humps, and reaching hands of a horde of Clockblocked mutants then dropping the girl next to Flechette. "Jack and Bonesaw went that way," Danny said through the speakers of the armor that Circus was wearing. "You two, go get him. I've still got you on the console, be safe."

"C'mon," Flechette said, grabbing the other girl's hand and running on. She was glad to get out of the room, not just because of the deformed monsters but also to put space between her and the meddling liar that called himself Druid.

Crawler dragged himself into Noelle's reach, and a massive clawed foot landed on his back, the claws scraping against his invulnerable shell for a second before it wavered and they sank into his toughened hide. Oni Lee finished cutting upwards, severing the right side of Crawler's body from the left, right from the side of the neck back to the second pair of legs that were still regrowing. He turned and started cutting again, carving away even more of the monster's mass with his power-infected weapons. A voice buzzed in his ear, the boss telling him to leave this target. Oni Lee nodded and teleported away, only a second before the Crawler was pulled into Noelle's gelatinous mass. Oni Lee began killing the pitifully disfigured creations that were trying to kill the boss's other soldiers, never slowing.

"Shit, falling back," Velocity said into his mike. He zipped through the crowd and up the ramp, shedding his armor as he went. The breastplate fell into two smoking halves as he dropped it, and every other score and scratch from a Ravager-clone burned through the armor on every other plate. "Damn," he panted. "I don't think I can go back down there."

"Understood," Danny said. "Get to Leet and Uber, help them."

A second later both Battery and Assault came up the same way, also stripping out of the armor that had kept them alive this far. "Don't wanna have this stuff on me when it finishes eating through," Assault said, cutting away the smoking parts of his undersuit before the damage could spread to his flesh.

"We've gotta hold this line," Battery said, staring down the ramp. "We can't let them out."

"They don't want out," Vista said, limping out. "Ow. Ow. They're defending Big Momma back there. And I think they've got the other tunnels overrun, they can move through the city underground and come up wherever they want. We're not holding any kind of line here."

Panacea helped the girl out of her armor and found the spreading wounds on her thigh. The flesh separated, and the wounded area dropped away like a shed petal, replaced by healthy new flesh from underneath. Clockblocker walked up the ramp in his undersuit, leaving the armor behind and frozen in time to cover the exit. Browbeat and Circus came up through the ladder, moving to rendezvous with the others. She shed the Druid armor without a word, despite it not being marked or damaged, stripping down to her harlequin garb.

"Done!" Leet called out from the side.

"And it's about damn time," Trainwreck said, stepping back.

"It's a damn pickaxe! It's not meant to tunnel through dirt! If I'd had the shovel, this would have been a five-second job!" the weedy little man protested, as they lowered Hatchet Face down the hole with the grapnel. A ten-meter hole with sloped sides, angled down to a rounded concrete surface. It had been meant to be a simple tunnel, but the pickaxe did nothing to keep dirt from collapsing into the hole, and they'd been forced to excavate huge volumes of dirt to get the tunnel this deep. Add to which that the pickaxe would only destroy matter in chunks one meter on a side, and it was a wonder it had gotten done at all. And as the writhing Hack Job dropped onto the concrete, there was a titanic roar from underground. Leet looked up at Uber, his eyes wide. "Shit. Shit that's loud."

Danny was wearing the brown undersuit from his Druid armor, squinting without his glasses. "Okay, we need to wait for Clockblocker's obstructions to become movable again, and then launch the second offensive. If we can kill Noelle, we can mop up her creations."

"Not actually that easy," Dauntless said. "There could be thousands of them down there. Thousands of homicidal parahumans, Druid. We are so far past being outnumbered here. Why isn't the PRT sending help?"

"Everyone's on standby for a possible hit by the Ash Beast on a metropolitan area," Danny said. "I think at this point everyone thinks of Brockton Bay as the city that cried wolf. Claiming two Class-S threats simultaneously just a couple months after an Endbringer attack, I think everyone would rather believe that we're exaggerating."

Ballistic looked better than he had before, rested and refreshed by Panacea's touch. He was still dressed in hand-me-downs that had been stored in a sewer. "Wharf Rat, we meet again," he said, reaching forward to shake the older man's hand. "Glad you came to help."

"Tell me what we're up against," the Wharf Rat said. "I've done pretty well with guesswork so far, but I'd like some real information."

"She used to be our team leader, but her powers were unstable," Ballistic said. "If anyone touches her, she creates an evil twin. If she absorbs them, she keeps creating more and more evil twins. She's always angry and always hungry these days. She can eat any kind of dead meat and she grows, anything alive gets absorbed and cloned. She can regenerate from anything, she's indestructible and unkillable. She's stronger than she looks, and she looks damned strong. That vomit is toxic, a crazy brew of germs, and it's also really high pressure. No matter how many clones or vomit she creates, she never loses a pound. She only ever gets bigger, anytime she eats. No limits that we've ever found. She got stuck in the tunnels when we were trying to find a way out of the city after Coil got nabbed, and before we could get her loose she started growing even more, just wedged in too tight. The bigger she got the more pissed off she was all the time, and she grabbed some sewer workers and sent out their evil clones. That was when we knew we had to hold her back. So Sundancer and Genesis would take shifts sealing the tunnel to keep us safe so she wouldn't try to grab us anymore. It just... it got way out of hand."

Wharf Rat nodded. "Okay, that actually makes sense. But you say she kept growing?"

"It's the sewage," Ballistic said. "She absorbed it and grew. It's not good for her though, not like raw meat. So she's been growing and getting sicker all this time."

"Shit," Wharf Rat said. "Growing, continuously. And the further she grows, the more surface area she has, the more she absorbs and grows. We have to stop her."

"How?" Sundancer demanded, still sounding terrified. "She's not a villain, she's not even an Endbringer, she's so much more than that!"

Wharf Rat looked over at the others. "So, Hatchet Face might not be able to suppress her powers..."

Gambler came over the comms. "Hey, let me to settle that issue for you. She's not an Endbringer, she's still a parahuman. And there's a ninety-one-ish percent chance that Hatchet Face can suppress her powers. That nine percent is probably just to rule out you doing something weird and stupid like feeding him to her."

"Thanks Gambler," Wharf Rat said. "Okay, we're going to- hang on," he said, as the earpiece began buzzing. The machine let off a whining hum that rose swiftly in pitch. Danny was staring straight at the others, trying to figure it out. Circus was the only one who got their earpiece out in time, before they self-destructed. Danny lay on the ground, clutching at the side of his head as the world spun around him. It took him a few dazed seconds to realize that his inner ear was damaged, and that was why he was so disoriented. That and the pain. Then Panacea got a hand on him and in a few seconds he was fine.

He rolled to a sitting position, and caught his breath. His throat was raw and he had not even been aware that he'd been screaming. "Oh fuck," he murmured, "we just lost comms. We've got no way to reach anyone. Oh shit Taylor."

"Your daughter," Dauntless said, his face still pale. "Okay, we'll split the team. You take a squad and go find her, I'll finish off Noelle here."

"Right," Wharf Rat said, nodding. "Panacea, Parian, Oni Lee, Trainwreck, Circus, Uber, Leet, you guys are with me."

Mouse Protector appeared from thin air right at his side. "Hey, guys, everything that can generate a resonant tone in the city just went kablooey. Speakers, crystals, and our comms. Is everything okay?"

"We got split up," Wharf Rat said. "Did you ever mark Benthic or Flechette?"

"Uh, no," she said, crestfallen. "Where can I help?"

"Bring a bunch of nano-weapons here for Dauntless's squad to use," he said. "We'll be back around to check on them but first, we're going in after Jack and Bonesaw."

Mouse Protector looked around at his squad. "No, um, no offense, Wharf Rat, but these guys are not who I'd take against the Slaughterhouse Nine. You've got a full Protectorate team and a Wards team and-"

"And Jack Slash took ten seconds to turn them against me," Danny pointed out. "They resent me, Mouse. They put a brave face on it, but I don't fit in with them and I never will. Normally that's not a big deal, but against Jack Slash it's crucial. I can't be going after him with a team that tolerates me to keep the PRT happy."

She paused, bit her lip, and nodded. "Okay. Good luck. Godspeed."

They stormed the main chamber all together. The first move was a sweep of rats that cut tendons and hamstrings to bring the mutants down a peg. Dauntless mowed down the first wave with one pass of his spear, cutting bodies in half from the left wall to the right. Oni Lee hit like a dozen bombs, teleporting through their ranks and knocking those sprawling that survived the first volley. The heroes broke right to kill the thing that had been Noelle, while her regeneration was still offline. The rogues broke left to hit the tunnel that Benthic and Flechette had followed Jack Slash and Bonesaw. Trainwreck was the first one in, then Circus, then Uber and Leet, then Wharf Rat, then Panacea and Parian. Oni Lee teleported up into the point position ahead of Trainwreck. The tinker in his giant powered armor flicked a switch, and headlights beamed from his shoulders, illuminating the way ahead of them. "Plastic lenses," he said. "The only kind that survived Shatterbird."

Rats were gathered and mustered to them as they walked. The tunnel divided into two smaller lines in just a block, real sewers were not meant for people to walk around in. The rats easily indicated which way to go, but it was a question of who was going to be able to make it. Uber just shrugged and squirmed into the tight opening, with the aplomb of a skilled contortionist. Leet followed, just plain small and skinny enough to make it. Circus came after, then Panacea and Parian, then Danny. Oni Lee was stripping out of his armor, and he came next. Trainwreck was the last, it took him a while to dismantle one gauntlet from his armor and attach the main power source to it so he could fit through the tunnel with at least some of his armor.

Uber reached the next fork, and rats easily indicated which way he was to go. As the rest of the group scooted along, Parian handed out strips of cloth to tie over their noses to block out the smell of feces and rot. And nobody tried to think too much about this mission. The path they took wound along a bit, working their way uphill as they worked against the gravity flow of the sewage. They paused briefly when a massive shudder ran through the ground, like a bomb going off or an earthquake. "Shit," Leet opined, and then they got back to finding the Wards.

And to the relief of all, the trail took them to an overflow tank in the storm drains, an open space with a mildly musty smell. They each took a quick dip through the accumulated water to wash away the sewage. And only fifty feet down a tunnel, they found Benthic sitting on top of Jack Slash's back. He was bound at his hands and feet with containment foam which was serving to hogtie him. Flechette leaned against a wall next to Bonesaw, who looked pouty and petulant, eyes downcast and her hands pressed together in front of her. "How did you do it?" Parian asked, amazed.

"I walked up to him and I punched him until he shut up," Benthic said, shrugging. "What, like it's hard?"

Flechette glared at the Wharf Rat. "I still don't like you. And I'm going back to New York when this is done. To hell with this city. Don't call me for any more Endbringer attacks if you're going to be involved." The walls around her were scarred by acid and etched by marks he couldn't recognize in this lighting. Clearly there had been a hell of a fight to take Bonesaw down, despite Benthic's off-handed comment. And her venom towards him was new too.

Wharf Rat looked over at Benthic, his eyebrow cocked curiously.

"It took a while for him to shut up," Benthic said. "The man has a gift for pushing buttons."

Circus was looking over Bonesaw while the little girl glared daggers. Panacea walked over to see as well, and paused. "What the- how? What-why?"

"The brat is pretty resourceful," Flechette said. "First she dislocated her thumbs to get out of the zip ties. Then she popped loose a shiv made of bone once we had her zip-tied more thoroughly. She can spit poison, she's got something under her fingernails I don't want a better look at, she even started to shed her skin to get away from me. So I had to use my darts to pin her hands together, and her knees, and her jaw, and pin her elbows to her ribcage. I can take those out once we've got her back at the Tower."

Panacea had her hand on Bonesaw's shoulder, her finger brushing the girl's neck for the smallest skin-to-skin contact. "Okay, this is... wow. I can do biokinesis, but I would never have thought of a lot of this stuff. Okay, whatever you guys do, don't let her vomit. Or pull her hair out. I can read all of this, and I can see how it's done, but I would never had imagined these myself. And I would never have dared to try a lot of this. Damn." She pulled her hand back, shaking her head.

Taylor cleared her throat. "Okay, if you help us to the surface, we can get these two back to the Tower."

Danny looked down at Jack Slash. "We're in Class-S protocols. We took Burnscar prisoner because she's known to be insane, known to be treatable, and had usable intelligence for us. We took Hatchet Face alive because we had a plan for him. But this is Jack Slash. If there's the remotest chance he could escape, we can't afford that chance. None of us can. If he gets sent to the Birdcage, god knows what would happen. If he gets to the Tower alive, someone might make a decision that ends with him being set free."

"That's cold blood," Taylor pointed out, her voice tense. "He's unarmed, restrained, and unconscious."

"Take Bonesaw back to the Tower, she may be a candidate for rehabilitation," Wharf Rat said, his voice hollow-sounding.

Oni Lee took a step forward, facing Jack, interposing himself between Danny and the leader of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Danny clapped the Asian man on the shoulder. "I appreciate the offer, but I can't ask you to do this for me," Danny said, kneeling down. He grabbed Jack Slash by the back of his jacket and hauled him half-upright, then dragged him to the overflow tank.

In the movies, it always takes five minutes or more to drown someone. Danny was genuinely surprised that Jack Slash was dead in about sixty seconds. Shockingly easy. Just to be certain, a rat clipped through the carotid artery, and the flow was sluggish and dark-colored. Without a beating heart, arteries flow like veins. Oni Lee helped him carry the body upstairs. Bonesaw started wailing. Everyone else was staring in the same direction.

"They didn't kill her," Parian pointed out.

"They botched it," Uber corrected.

"Shit that's huge," Trainwreck observed.

Having been forced to do all of her growing in tunnels had caused her to grow in a shape like the tunnels, so that when she finally ripped free of the tunnels and the ground, she looked like a massive fleshy earthworm with a human torso, head and arms perched on top of it. Noelle was reared up like a cobra, standing nearly a hundred feet in the air, visible from a great distance. And the serpentine body was studded with eyes, legs, mouths, exposed muscle, whorls of gnarled callus, clusters of tentacles, even a couple more Noelle torsos that hung off at odd angles and dangled downwards. One wide mouth near the ground opened wide and vomited forth a half-dozen bodies.

"That's where they all came from," Danny said. "She was swallowing people in front of us, but regurgitating clones in the other tunnels, where we couldn't see. That's how she was able to rush us with an army."

"If she's making new monsters with each of those mouths, and we've been gone for twenty minutes, how many of those clones can she have made?" Uber asked, stroking his chin.

"What's the name of that demon that looks like a woman with a snake body?" Danny asked without looking at anyone in particular.

"Lamia," Parian answered.

"Lamia," Danny repeated, absently.

"Shit, that's a giant tornado out on the beach," Benthic said, pointing.

"Guess a Shatterbird clone happened that can control silica in that form," Panacea said.

"And I've still got that feeling that the worst is still ahead of us," Leet complained.

"Hundreds of Shatterbirds, hundreds of Crawlers, but sure," Trainwreck said. "Sure, the worst part is still to come."

"You're an asshole," Uber said, scowling at Trainwreck.

"It's been said," the other man said, as he grappled the Crawler-clone. He worked to hold it still without injuring it so that it would adapt further. It was scabrous and foul, but with each regeneration it seemed to be growing more symmetrical, more refined, as if its regeneration was compensating for the imperfect process of Noelle's cloning. Tentacles emerged from its elbows and knees, and a row of bladed spines ran down its back.

"I miss Clockblocker for this," Parian said, as she shot out spools of thread to bind the clone's limbs, immobilizing it further.

"Though truthfully, only for this," Panacea said, as she stepped forward and touched the clone on the shoulder. It froze and went stiff as she made contact. "He's kind of a pest."

"They're starting to come faster now as we approach the epicenter," Danny reminded her. "Don't just disconnect that one, Amy."

She paused, grimaced, and looked down at her arm. There was a long slice taken out of it from her should to halfway down her wrist, curving where a Shatterbird had nearly speared her with a sliver of glass. The wound was stuffed full of bacteria now, sealing the wound and speeding the healing process. She couldn't use her powers on herself, but she could use her powers very very close to herself, and that was almost enough. "It's gonna be really gross, Wharf Rat."

"And I'm sorry about that," Danny said, grimacing with her. "But you're really vulnerable and we have to make sure we're ready for what we're going to find."

"So are Uber and Leet!" she pointed out.

"Uber and Leet are protected, and aren't on the front line," Danny pointed out. "None of us can take down the Crawlers but you and Oni Lee, and you're much faster than he is. If we can protect you, we'll make better time." But he still spared a look backwards at the massive conglomeration contraption that Trainwreck had kit-bashed in ten minutes. It was made of a dozen cars and it showed, it was huge and it rolled over lesser cars like a tank. Trainwreck was half driving it, and half wearing it, his new suit was indistinguishable from the vehicle. But it was heavily armored, and very stable so that it could be used as a mobile laboratory without the driving process disrupting too much. And Leet was in there, working on the last steps of his resonant-frequency-dampener. Uber was sitting in the shielded gunnery pit with his sniper rifle, looking to put down some more Shatterbirds. It was easier than the original, because they didn't have all the upgrades from Bonesaw making them inhumanly tough, and they were sharing a city's worth of glass so some of them were working with less material than they'd like.

Panacea looked at the Crawler she held paralyzed. "But it's just... god, I can't even imagine doing it. It's just ... gross. And besides, you're not wearing armor anymore."

"And I'm not going anywhere near the bad guys if I don't have to," he pointed out.

She sighed, and turned her gaze back to the Crawler clone. It began to shift in her hands, growing wider but flatter, a long wound appearing on the near side and then sealing shut. Its bones grew visible through the wound and rearranged themselves, while thousands of smaller and more complex processes went on out of sight. And then Panacea opened the flesh up, and pushed her foot inside, sliding it down through the monster's leg. Then the other foot, then she ducked her head to tuck her upper body inside. The seam sealed closed behind her, and Panacea was wearing the reconstructed mutant as a suit of armor. It began reconfiguring, growing thick chitinous plates on its chest and shoulders and head, heavy claws at the hands. "How does it look?" the creature said, her inflection coming through a guttural monstrous larynx.

"Terrifying," Wharf Rat said. "You tracking all right in there?"

"Bioluminescent screen in here, hooked directly to the optic nerves," she said. "A lot like the display in your own armor."

He nodded, but he was partially distracted when his rats stumbled across a knot of sleeping bodies in a nearby apartment. A small room with dozens of twisted, gnarled figures laying on a bed, chair, desk, the floor, sprawled all about. Most of them had severely damaged legs or none at all, and all of them had the rhythmic breathing and slowed heartrates of deep sleep. The figures that could be identified as a gender were female, and he sent his rats in to sever arteries and bleed them out. For every one of them that died here, somewhere in the city a projection vanished.

Parian circled overhead, riding a pair of vast fabric wings. She turned to the mouse that rode on her collar. "I don't know if you can see this, but it looks like there's a higher concentration to the south. If you steer north, you can avoid some major concentrations of her spawn." The mouse looked up at her and nodded, and she went back to scouting. And below, one of her massive creations was walking with the team, a long-limbed thing like a four-legged spider that stilted along. It was made mostly of heavy tarp and denim, and had already survived onslaughts from a half-dozen Shatterbirds and Genesis creations. She had to have line of sight to guide it, but from the sky she had a lot of line of sight. And with a small mouse perched on its belly, he could see whatever it could see, within his range.

"Hang on, got another group of the tricky ones," Wharf Rat said as they came in range. "And they're... shit, they're trying to break into a shelter. Everyone, on the double!" He stepped back as Trainwreck revved his engines, and Danny grabbed a handle and swung up onto a footrest as they sped along. The mouse on the dashboard directed the driver which way to go, and the rest of the team mounted up. It was less safe to travel this way, but speed was of the essence. Anything could be a trap or an ambush, but to protect a shelter they'd have to take that chance. Each of the sunken bunkers could hold hundreds or tens of thousands of citizens, depending.

Circus crouched on the roof, not far from Uber's sniper's nest. Panacea jogged alongside them, taking long bounding steps that carried her twenty feet at a time. She fell behind on the straightaways, but the Trainwreck contraption needed to slow down through the intersections so it could cross the broken pavement that Leviathan had left behind at the water mains, and she could vault those without pausing. Oni Lee teleported from rooftop to rooftop, back in his gold and black armor, keeping a high overwatch position. Wharf Rat had found himself surprised at how fast this squad had gelled together, considering that two of them were infamous assassins who never spoke, one was a pacifistic hero, one was a skittish fashion designer with no allegiances, one was a grouchy inventor who only worked on junk, one was a small girl who lived with her parents, two were the least respected villains in the city, and then there was himself. It shouldn't work at all, but it had a strange sort of chemistry.

They reached the entrance to the shelter. It was largely inconspicuous, just a heavy concrete door set into a heavy concrete wall. And one console on the exterior that controlled the locks and the contact to the interior. There were a couple dozen people clustered around the panel, arguing to be let in. The ones in the back were carrying weapons, and a Ravager clone was lurking nearby. The normal-looking ones had a wide range of appearances, and all of them were dressed in whatever they could steal on the way. Fortunately, they all smelled odd to the nose of a rodent, and he didn't need to be worried that they were killing any innocents. He was pretty sure that somehow those men and women were clones of that long-haired pretty-boy who had been with the Travelers down in the sewer.

Oni Lee ripped through them in seconds, while the rest of the squad watched for other attackers. The assassin appeared next to the Ravager in an explosion that blasted it and wounded it badly, then he took two fast steps to bring him close to the crowd. He threw the two nano-saw weapons and they cut straight through the crowd while he teleported to the opposite side, catching his own weapons easily and leaving the clones dead on the ground. But the noise brought out a dozen Crawlers that leaped off a high roof to charge them. The monsters had apparently been fighting each other to force their regeneration to adapt them to ever-fiercer forms. There were variations, but they all had a distinctive Crawler look as the power tried to fit them to a particular mold. Some of them even retained some of the original's power, one of the Crawlers was strobing monochrome occasionally as it showed a borrowed piece of Siberian's power.

Oni Lee led the charge, teleporting into their midst to knock them off-balance with his explosion. They were wounded and disoriented, slowed down. He went after the strobing clone and started carving, cutting the clone in half and then quarters in very little time. Panacea grabbed one with a massive claw and lifted it upright, then her armor shifted as if the arm was shortening by several inches, bringing the captive Crawler in close enough for her to touch it with her own hand. The captured clone went limp and stopped regenerating, and dropped to the ground with a thud. Trainwreck's contraption swung out an arm the size of a tree trunk and crushed one monster so extensively that it took several seconds to heal, and by then the tires were rolling over it. Uber distracted one with a supersonic bullet to the face, and Parian's tarp-spider used that opportunity to wrap it up tightly in one long, flexible leg, gripping it tightly to immobilize. Circus whacked one with a giant mallet that appeared and disappeared at her whim, knocking it to an easy position for the tarp-spider to bind up tightly. Most of the team could only temporarily stop the creatures, but they could buy enough time for Oni Lee to cut them apart mercilessly, or for Panacea to disable their powers and their lifesigns at the same time.

They crossed paths with another knot of Tricksters working with a pack of Ravagers who tried to ambush them by teleporting Wharf Rat and Uber into an upper-story apartment full of monstrous clones. Uber switched his expertise to Krav Maga and held them off long enough for Oni Lee to teleport to the rescue and mess up that strategy. Circus and Parian arrived seconds later, helping him to pin down the mutants and finish them off. After that a Genesis creation attacked the workshop/tank, a flying creature with a seventy-foot wingspan, a needle-sharp beak, and a deathwish. The impact from terminal velocity was enough to nearly take the contraption off of its wheels altogether, and it took several minutes to repair the damage. From then on they did a better job watching for aerial threats.

"Ah, shit, something new is happening," Wharf Rat said through the window towards Trainwreck. He gestured the others a little closer and described what the rats could see. "More mutants, these are bigger than most of the rest. The skin is kinda grayish on most of them. They've got weapons, crowbars and baseball bats and axes. They look strong. And they're standing in a line across the road, ten feet apart from each other, from one side to the other. We're gonna have to go through them."

"Are you pondering what I'm pondering?" Leet said to Uber.

"Hatchet Face," the big man replied. "Looks like that's what went wrong after we left, the Protectorate lost control of Hatchet Face and he got swallowed, so now his power is working for her not against her. So now there's a bunch of homicidal clones of a super-strong, super-tough power suppressor."

"So, this would take most groups offline entirely," Trainwreck said. "The Protectorate would quake in their boots, and New Wave would not go within fifty feet of this."

"I can confirm that," Panacea said. "Fortunately, Hatchet Face is vulnerable to Circus's knives and fire at a range, Uber's sniper rifle, Trainwreck's bash-o-matic, Parian's big stompy spider, the rats, and even my big nasty Crawler-esque power armor, up to a point."

"And even Oni Lee could just throw rocks at them super-hard and super-accurate until they died," Parian pointed out. "So, we steamroll them."

"And what I'm pondering is that it looks a little too pat," Wharf Rat said. "It's almost like bait. It's an easy fight that would be crazy-hard for almost anyone but us. They could just not realize what we can do, it could be an accident on their part that created an easily exploitable weakness. But if I was them, the only way I'd lay out a situation like this was if I was trying to arrange a distraction and get my enemies overconfident."

Parian plucked at her sleeve. "So, what's the trap? There's several office buildings right around here with completely empty windows and no glass on the ground around them, plenty of ammo for Shatterbird. There could be a bunch of them hidden to get the drop on us. Or a dozen Tricksters to teleport us each in different directions so we all get ambushed separately and wiped out. Or gods know what Genesis could throw at us."

"We could lose a lot of time second-guessing," Wharf Rat said, "or we could just go for it. I'd really like to have Gambler in my ear for this. You learn to appreciate her as soon as she's not around. Okay, we're gonna go for it. Oni Lee, there's a building right here, on my signal I want you to teleport into this corner of it and start cutting everything structural you can see, tip it over right on top of them. The rest of us are going to run right down the street and try to respond to any counterattacks."

A minute later the skyscraper tipped over and flattened all the Hatchet Face clones, and the workshop/tank rolled right over the rubble and out into the clear.

"That was actually anticlimactic," Panacea said. She jogged alongside the workshop/tank easily enough. The past few fights had bulked up her armor, she now stood about eight feet tall and was covered in massive muscles and thick armor plates.

"It's nice to have thing turn out not to be worse than they look from time to time," Wharf Rat replied, still hanging on the

"If you're in the mood for good news, I've got it finished," Leet said, poking his head out the window. "The frequency counterdevice. It should take all the Shatterbirds offline everywhere in the city."

"Fire it up, the sooner all of her are out of commission the sooner we can work on rebuilding," Wharf Rat said.

A few seconds later, and twenty miles away, a giant tornado of sand fell apart and the mutated woman in the middle of it fell a couple hundred feet, cussing all the way down. Similar scenes played out all over the city as Shatterbirds lost the ability to control resonant frequencies and carry their telekinetic abilities across them. They were jubilant until they found a shelter that had been melted open with concentrated acid, and the interior of it was filled with blood, but no bodies. That sobered the mood again.

"I just noticed," Parian said to the mouse on her collar. "Look at the places that have been ripped open. Convenience stores, some gun shops, stuff like that, sure. But look at that grocery store, it's been ransacked. So has that one, and that one." She flew in a wide arcing circle now, much bolder and much higher now that the issue of Shatterbird was resolved. All she needed to watch for was flying Genesis projections or Crawlers that had mutated wings.

The rats streamed in to investigate, and found a common theme. Fresh meat was gone, the seafood displays were cleaned out, preserved meats were missing, poultry was completely absent, and even the canned tuna was off the shelves. Clones had ransacked the place looking for meat to feed their mistress. Probably from all over the city. And that put the missing bodies from the shelter into horrifying new light.

"We're not gonna make it across the city before dark," Trainwreck said. "We're having to slow down too much for the clones. We're heading away from Lamia and towards the Tower, but there's still a ton of these things and we lose as much time avoiding them as we do fighting them. Between that and the crap road conditions, we're not going to get there until after sundown."

Leet scratched his chin. It was a long lantern jaw like a parody of his partner's strong cleft chin. "The clones should have been slowing down. We're moving away from the source, and we're making better time than they'd be on foot. As they spread out in a broader perimeter, they should be thinning out, fewer clones covering more area, even with the constant production of them from the Lamia. But if anything it's gotten thicker, tougher, as we've gone. There seems to be more clones in front of us than behind us."

Uber shrugged. "Well, they do have teleporters."

"Shit," Danny muttered. "They have teleporters. And they come in variations, not all of them are going to trade places like the original Trickster. There's probably a few that can open portals or something to move huge numbers of clones at once. And where would be the first place they'd attack?"

"The Tower that we're headed towards," Trainwreck said, scowling. "Look, I know the plan was to re-connect with the heroes and then go after Lamia, but that plan is starting to suck. We can cut southwest and get to herself pretty soon, finish this off. With her dead, we can at least know that things aren't getting worse at an exponential rate. Do you think the eight of us have a shot?"

"I can't answer that," Danny said. "Let's get the Gambler, and then we'll take a shot at it." Up above, Parian's mouse indicated for her to drop low so that she could get new instructions. And minutes later she was flying off west towards Shearsea, while the rest of the team cut towards the south.

The sun was near setting when Uber ran out of ammunition. "That's it for me," he said. "Let me know when you guys see another gun store, I might be able to re-equip if we've got time."

"We won't have time," Wharf Rat said. "But we'll find a way to keep you useful."

"We're dealing with a lot more Genesis than we used to," Leet said. "I think it's because she's crippled, so she's concentrated closest to the source."

"There's more of everything," Panacea said. "But especially Genesis. Which sucks, I'm not very good against those."

"Leave some for the rest of us," Trainwreck chuckled. "Maybe I don't want every fight to end just because you got your hands on the bad guys."

Circus punched him lightly on the shoulder. Her expressions couldn't be made out, but she managed to emote some anyway. Then she went back to measuring out her next Molotov cocktail, wedging a rag in the neck, and vanishing it to her interdimensional space where she stored her weapons.

"Doppelgangers, twelve o'clock," Wharf Rat reported. "Guns and knives." It was the weirdly human-looking mutants that could seem to be just members of the populace, if not for their distinctive smell and their murderous intent, and the fact that the populace was all sitting in shelters at the time.

Oni Lee nodded and jogged off to the side to be safely clear of the others before he teleported. He reappeared in the midst of the murderous mutants that had the deceptively attractive features. He flung one body at another with uncanny strength and precision until they were all fallen, then waited for the convoy to catch up with him.

A Shatterbird clone stumbled at them from the side, bleeding from hundreds of gashes. It seemed that when she lost control of glass, she was in an awkward position. She shambled forward with a lurching gait, holding a two-by-four and swinging it erratically. A rat emerged from the pile of garbage next to her, snipped her Achilles tendon, waited for her to fall, then severed her radial artery and then slunk back to safety. Another rat across the alley watched her to make sure she died promptly, but then something else caught its attention.

"Heads up," Wharf Rat called out, "Parian's back!"

The massive wings settled onto the pavement. Only the front edge of it actually had any strength or volume, an airfoil for lift and also enough telekinetic strength to flap the wings. The rest of the wing was broad flat silk taken from a parachute at a skydiving school, giving her a large gliding surface. As soon as they touched down the smaller of the two small figures disentangled herself and ran for the convoy. "Hey Wharf Rat!" she called out as she jogged across the pavement.

"I didn't expect you to show up in person," he said. "I thought Parian would just ask our questions and get our answers and we'd leave you in safety."

"Yeah, but my odds of survival are good, and I knew you'd have plenty of important questions for later," said Dinah Alcott, currently answering to Gambler.

"You knew that, huh?" he said, bending down to give her a hug.

"I didn't check because I knew," she said, and returned the hug. "Now then, you need to kill Lamia, and you've got a plan, you just need the right entry point, yeah?"

"Basically. I can't scout with my rats, the space is too tight and they keep getting killed. We've tried getting Uber to be an expert on the city's sewers but that really didn't help."

She nodded. "Okay. 'Hot and cold' isn't the easiest game to play for me, but I'll give it a shot." She stood in place, murmuring to herself for a few minutes, then looked up. "I need you to drive me that way," she said, pointing down one street. They loaded her into the tank and rode out, taking out Genesis projections as they popped up. They paused to take a few more readings, then kept driving. And finally, Dinah told them to stop. She climbed out, and paced around a bit. "Okay," she said. "this spot here? That's the halfway. So, what you should probably do is about five feet that way," she said. Oni Lee bent down and swiped his nano-saws, carving an X exactly where she indicated. Then she got back in the tank and started leading the way even further away. The light was fading, but Trainwreck just turned on a dozen headlights and kept driving. Parian took out a few Hatchet Faces, her giant tarp-spider grabbing them and slamming them against walls until something vital broke. Circus took out some Ravagers with throwing knives, Oni Lee dealt with Genesis projections and Crawlers. "Right here," she said, leaning forward in her seat. Trainwreck put on the brakes, and they all exited the vehicle.

Wharf Rat noticed the rust that covered the tank, corroded through to the framework. Side windows were dusty and cracked, rubber seals were peeling and discolored. Just a few hours after this thing had been built, it was falling apart. And the massive engine in the back was making worrying sounds. He walked away from it, and saw that Trainwreck was already picking out some new cars to fashion into a new suit for himself. Oni Lee marked the spot for the second incursion, and everyone made a mental note to memorize the area. Then they walked all the way back to the first mark, and began the process of killing Lamia.

"You're totally sure this will work," Leet said.

"Totally," Wharf Rat said.

"I'd like to be that sure, too," the little inventor said. "Walk me through your thinking."

"Fighting Lamia is going to be like fighting Crawler, or any very large, very high-power regenerator," Wharf Rat said. "Manageable pieces. We know that neither of them is a duplicator, so if they're cut into parts only one of those parts will regenerate, the rest will just die. Now when Oni Lee was cutting Crawler up earlier, the part that had the head was always the part that regenerated. But when the Travelers were trying to contain Lamia, they would use sunfire to burn her head completely off, and all the rest of the human torso along with it. So, the source of her regeneration isn't in her brain. That makes the logical conclusion from there is that whatever part of the body is the biggest is the part that will regenerate, the rest will die. So we cut her in half, then quarters, and keep her from regenerating. And then we just keep whittling until it's done. Fortunately, we've got three of those nano-saw weapons, and if we're smart about it we can leapfrog them to keep cutting her into smaller and smaller bits until she's something we can destroy all in one shot."

"I'm not convinced, but you really do seem confident," Leet said. "Okay, let's see what goes wrong first."

"You're a very unpleasant little man."

"They say that no plan survives contact with the enemy. I think you have yet to learn how true that is."

"Here," Uber said, the expert navigator. The rest of the team mustered up near him, looking at the X scored in the concrete.

"Okay," Trainwreck said. His new armor gleamed and purred, the car's engine repurposed to drive a steamwheel on his back, shedding a cloud of steam continuously as the motor ran. "So, we start here, then Oni Lee teleports to Site B, and pins it there, then we work backwards, yeah?"

Leet shouldered his way through. "See, this is how it's supposed to work," he grumbled, pulling the pickaxe out of his backpack. "Not like dirt. Not like back at the beginning of this fiasco." He struck the ground a few times, and the concrete disappeared with a small popping sound. Uber hooked the grapnel through the straps of Leet's costume and lowered him down. Another pop, and they lowered him some more. Eight more pops, and then Leet called up, "I've found it! And it is ugly! Get me up out of here!"

Oni Lee helped Uber haul Leet up out of the hole, and then he took the pickaxe and teleported to Site B. Circus stood by with one of the nano-saws, and then Panacea leaned over the hole and opened the mouth on her Crawler-armor. And gallons of Crawler's acid poured out of her mouth, searing the flesh underneath and boiling it away with a terrible stench. Circus dropped into the hole before the acid was done with its work, catching herself upside-down with her feet braced on either side of the tunnel and planting the nano-saw into the wall of the sewer pipe, set on its automated configuration. It sprang up a large hedge of hazy air, a blurring effect from the disassembly of all molecules. And it completely blocked the tunnel, separating one side from the other. Lamia was cut in two, with no way to rejoin the two halves. The smaller half began to decay, to degrade, while the larger half struggled to regenerate the damage. But the regenerated flesh was instantly vaporized, growing into the haze and being destroyed over and over.

The front end of Lamia, the face of Noelle, screamed so loudly that it could be heard for several city blocks. Her strength gone, she collapsed onto the pavement, heaving for breath as her body broke down. Her flesh ruptured under its own weight and copious fluids poured out. She melted onto the pavement, leaving the sacs of her captives to pull themselves to freedom. And while Circus pulled herself back up to the surface, Trainwreck flashed his headlights several times, signaling Oni Lee to repeat the process. In a minute, the massive monster Lamia was reduced to a section of body trapped in the sewers, with no head nor tail, bound at either end by a cloud of nanite disassemblers. Nowhere to regenerate to, nowhere to move or struggle. Not enough space to summon any clones to help itself out of there. No way to communicate with its spawn.

And then the group reconvened at the midpoint, pacing off the middle of Lamia's body before Leet pulled out his pickaxe again. He chopped down until he saw the grotesque translucent flesh, and then he made room for Oni Lee to leap down with the last nano-saw weapon. He slashed and cut deep, the regeneration slowed by his Butcher powers, and he filled in with explosions to exacerbate the wounds. And he slashed and burned until he had the body severed through, pushed back until he had enough room to plant the nano-saw as a protective hedge. He leaped out while her body attempted to regenerate through the lethal barrier, and half of what was left of her fell away.

Wharf Rat was sitting on a stoop, resting up, when Parian swooped over to him. "Got a problem, boss. The nano-saw that we need can't be moved. Oni Lee planted it too deep, nobody can switch it off. If you reach too close, it'll remove your hand. I can't even get it with my threads. Leet says we can't dig underneath it to get it, because if it falls the wrong way it'll kill one of us, or dig itself a hole to the earth's core, which would kill us all. So, we can't replant that nano, and that means that we can't cut Lamia in half again without lifting one of the other two nanos, which would let her regenerate even more."

He sighed. "Okay, you get back to the site and keep trying to help, come up with ideas. I'll be brainstorming." She nodded and flew off, and he slumped back against the doorframe behind him.

The city was quiet, no car horns and no engines. The people had been in their shelters for hours, most of a day now, and some elderly people or those with terminal illnesses would be dying from lack of medical care. Others would be getting stir crazy and starting trouble. And all of them would be hungry by now. But right now the streets were still filled with murderous monsters with superpowers. The only thing that would really help at this point was the combined efforts by the Protectorate, and even then it could take days to make the whole city safe again. A rat two blocks away saw something large and terrifying, and the rodent turned to watch it pass by. "Oh," Danny said, sitting upright. "Ah, shit." He started to send his rats to muster the others but then he paused. And something clicked. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked down the street towards the monster.

"Hey," Danny said, nodding towards the Crawler.

"Hero," the Crawler growled through its garbled guttural voice. "No, the Wharf Rat, the Druid."

"Wharf Rat will be fine," Danny said, inclining his head. The monster was bigger than before, with longer legs and a faster-moving profile. The tentacles that emerged from its joints and flanks were wreathed in a shroud of blurred air, the distinctive sign of nanite disassemblers. He had healed from Oni Lee's attack, and he had adapted to it. "So, you got free when we cut off Lamia's front end."

"I did," the thing snarled, stalking closer, its tail lashing.

"So, you came to finish off Lamia for yourself?"

Crawler paused. "It's not dead?"

"It's hurt, and struggling, and contained, but it's not dead. We're having trouble getting the last bit of it. I'm not surprised you want revenge against her."

"Why is that?" the monster demanded, straightening its posture and walking forward a few more steps.

Danny shrugged. "This thing swallowed you and started making clones with your powers. Hundreds of them, some of them every bit as tough as the original. And all of them serving her. Not themselves, just her. I thought maybe you'd be tired of serving others after Jack Slash walked away from you."

Its eyes narrowed suspiciously. "I came here to fight your man. The teleporter."

"And you're welcome to it. But I don't recommend killing him. Have you heard of the Butcher?"

"I have," the Crawler smiled through a forest of long fangs. "He has so many powers, and they are a gift to anyone that kills him."

"Right," Danny said. "All his powers. Even the one that wipes out his willpower and identity."

"You lie," the massive beast shot back.

"Rats can smell a lie, and I'm betting you can too," Danny said. "Tell me if I'm lying. One of Oni Lee's powers wipes out his mind, that's why he's so pliable that I've been able to keep a powerhouse like him on my team working for me."

"Not lying," Crawler said, sounding disappointed. "Whoever kills the Butcher gains his powers, but becomes a slave."

Danny shrugged. "Sorry. But maybe you two can still fight after Lamia's dead, just not to the death."

"You've taken the fun out of it," Crawler said, his stance relaxing. "This city is choked with lesser versions of me. Not, as you suggested, as tough and strong as me. She's ruining my good name. I cannot even hunt them down for a good fight, they are not my equal. But monsters like the Lamia are written of in history books. I will have it written that this creature was killed by the Crawler, and then I will be written into the history books. My name will outlive Jack Slash and the Siberian."

Danny walked down the street with the Crawler padding along at his side. The other parahumans working with him stiffened up, backing off, but Danny waved to them to stand down. They watched as the two figures approached.

"No, seriously, a baby shower," Danny was saying. "I mean, they all knew in advance, but I didn't know anybody knew until we were at the baby shower and they made the offer to back me up anytime I asked. God, I wish someone had a camera there so I could have seen my own face."

The Crawler was actually chuckling at the anecdote as the approached the squad. Oni Lee, Leet and Uber, Parian, Panacea, Trainwreck, Circus and Gambler all stared at the monster, not speaking. "I've come to do what you could not," the massive monster growled. It lowered its forelegs, and leaped down into the pit that Leet had carved. It pried loose the nano-saw that stood guard at that end, the tentacle cutting a trough through the concrete and then sweeping through the body of the weapon, destroying it to disable the nanite barrier. The Lamia's flesh immediately bloomed forward, attempting to regrow the creature. The Crawler's tentacles lashed all about, cutting it to pieces. It used the Siberian shell to push forward, shattering open the tunnel and forcing his way forth against the tide of meat. It advanced, implacable, slicing away parts that died faster than they regenerated, pushing deeper and removing more and more of its mass. The ground above it heaved as the massive beast displaced concrete with incalculable strength. The tentacles swept about, and eventually it ran out of Lamia.

All over the ground were gobbets of flesh that broke down and decayed, nothing that regenerated. The Crawler had pushed all the way to the far side of the tunnel, guarded by another nanite barrier. It would be easy to leave, all the Crawler needed to do was to use one nanite tentacle to destroy the weapon from underneath and not charge it like a maddened animal. It looked, and saw Oni Lee the Butcher standing on the other side of the nanite haze. It knew better than to kill the man, but maiming him would certainly be entertaining. And then the Crawler's mind was seized by a wild rage, a murderous instinct that would not be denied. It lunged forward, charged like a maddened animal. It collided headfirst with the nanite barrier and fell forward, vaporizing as it went. Its own momentum dragged what was left of the body into the haze of disintegration.

Parian squatted on the edge of the pit. "You know, I legitimately forget that he has that power," she said. The tarp-spider reached down to help Oni Lee exit without teleporting explosively.

"Okay, no more Lamia, no more original recipe Crawler," Leet said. "But tens of thousands of clones. So, at least now it's as bad as it's going to get, that's a thing. Also, we're out of nano-saws, it's full dark, we haven't heard from the Protectorate for hours, and I'm really wondering whether it's more likely that this city gets walled off like they did with Nilbog, or that they just nuke it and start over."

"I'm tired of this city turning into a radioactive wasteland," Uber said. "Let's make that not happen."

"Agreed," Leet said.

"Get me to a fabric store, and I'll get you all to the Protectorate tower within the hour," Parian promised.

The city's power plants had been offline for half a day, but Danny was sure that the tower should have had a backup generator at work to keep it at least at emergency power. As soon as they were within his six-hundred-foot radius, he mobilized the rats and had them swarm up to take a look.

"Holy shit," he gasped. "Guys, the tower, it's been overrun. It's a ruin in there." Taylor was in there.

"Fuck, they must have been hit hard while we were in transit," Trainwreck cursed, punching the denim layer he sat on. The creation was oddly spindly looking, with a dozen flapping wings that kept them aloft. "The teleporters moved the assault force here, because it's a static defense, instead of trying to find us while we were on the move."

The rats were stopping at a series of hermetically-sealed barriers. "Armsmaster's workshop is sealed up tight. It's the most heavily-fortified part of the tower. That's our best shot," Danny said, trying not to hope. Trying not to lose hope. The roil of conflict filled his stomach and his mind, the frustration. Had he done the only right thing? Had he missed the right path? He shoved the second-guessing away and tried to concentrate.

"We should see what's wrong with the generator," Uber proposed.

"The generator's been smashed," Leet said. "Otherwise they'd be using it. Okay, I'm guessing that's the workshop?" he said, pointing at the only intact windows on the building, a full bank on one of the upper floors, behind which all was dark. With a bare sliver of moonlight and a smattering of stars out, this was one of the darkest nights Danny had ever seen in this city. But it was still too light out to see through the window, refraction turned it into a mirror.

"That is the workshop," Danny confirmed. "Parian, can you put us in one floor above that?"

"Not cleanly," she said.

"We'll take what we can get," Danny said, and braced himself.

The cloth wings hit the side of the building with a massive slapping sound, and the nine of them tumbled across the floor. The interior was ransacked, desks toppled over and papers thrown around, even the ceiling tiles were pulled down and laying in a soggy mess on the floor.

"Ow," Leet groaned. "Got a sprain here."

"Cuts and bruises," Parian reported.

"Me too," Gambler said, her voice surprisingly upbeat.

"On it," Panacea said, pulling herself upright. Her Crawler suit was stripped down and lightweight, barely more than a thick layer of clothing over her body. But the tiny tears in it from the crash landing were already regenerating, thickening and toughening. The leather-like layer peeled back from her hand, and she laid her palms onto Leet, Parian and Gambler in turn to heal their injuries.

"Oh! I can see now!" the small girl said. "Neat!"

"It's dark," Panacea pointed out. "If you guys are going to need nightvision, I should give you nightvision." She continued around the circle, refitting everyone's eyes. Danny even got his nearsightedness fixed, and suddenly he was better able to see in the dark without his glasses than he had been able to see in the light with them before.

"I could see working with you long-term if you're gonna hand out upgrades like this," Trainwreck said, and Circus nodded along with him. She was reaching behind her back and pulling out components of his armor, handing them off to him to strap himself in. He started to step into a heavy steel boot with steam-driven pistons, then paused. "Hang on, Circus, this one still has one of your Molotovs in it," he said, pulling the homemade incendiary bomb out of the boot and and handing it back to her. It hit her hand and disappeared.

Oni Lee scooped his hand down through the wreckage of the room and came up with a razorlike sword with a long straight blade and a needlelike point. His other hand came up with a belt full of throwing knives that he looped over his shoulder. Uber tapped the smaller man's shoulder, and nodded at the sword. "Can you spare one of those for me?" he asked. Oni Lee reached down and used his Butcher power to turn loose materials into new shapes, and created a sword for Uber.

"Okay, we keep Gambler at the middle," Danny said. "Panacea, keep a close eye on her. Parian, can you reshape this thing into something combat-oriented?" He patted the deflated fabric that had carried them in.

"Hmm, this'll be different, it's not out in the open like the Leviathan fight," she thought about it, squinting as she considered. "Yeah, I may have just the thing." Threads started unraveling themselves, and the cloth split open and began reconfiguring itself.

"Oni Lee, can you see anything I don't see?" Wharf Rat asked the assassin.

Oni Lee looked down, and held up six fingers. He looked up, and swept his sword from one side of the ceiling to the other.

"I take that to mean that there's six people in the floor below us, and the top levels are stuffed full, probably enemies," Danny said. From up here he had a small contact with the ground, and was only able to call up a small number of rats and bring them up through the walls. He considered waiting, cruising around the block to muster up more rodents. But for all he knew, time was of the essence. The Slaughterhouse Nine and Lamia had double-teamed the city and the Protectorate, and there was no way to know who might be killed or tortured if he spent an hour gathering rats. So, he was under-equipped, but he had a good team with him. And, he had a silent vow to himself to never be forced onto the defensive like this, working on someone else's timetable. This was the last time, he swore. From this day forward, every confrontation he was in, he was in on his own terms.

"Trainwreck, you ready?"

"Locked up tight," the long-haired man said, flexing his mechanical muscles.

"Uber? Leet?"

"Give us the countdown," Uber said, his partner nodded.

"Circus? Oni Lee?" Two nods.

"Parian? Panacea?"

"Few more seconds," Parian said as her new creation filled out.

"I could use some buffing," Panacea said. "The Crawler-suit needs something to adapt to before it'll get tougher."

Uber turned and very carefully, very precisely started cutting into her arm. He laid the blade on her forearm and drew back, leaving only shallow cuts that would not penetrate all the way to her skin. On his third pass the blade did not cut, merely scraped across the new scales that had formed on the surface. He whacked at her a bit harder, and the suit began to bulk up, adding padding underneath to cushion the blows. She began accelerating the process, and the suit began to grow thicker and stronger by the second.

"Okay," Wharf Rat said, nodding. "Let's get upstairs and see what we're dealing with."

"You mean downstairs," Leet corrected him. "That's where the workshop full of superweapons is."

Danny shook his head. "And it's locked up so tight that not even my rats can get in. They're not going to unlock that until the enemy is dead, if they're smart, and they are smart. We go up, we clean house, then we head down to the workshop."

"Hate this," Leet said under his breath, but he nodded his acceptance.

The rooms were pitch black and difficult even with their upgraded eyes. The mess and wreckage was so complete that every step was stepping over something or turning sideways to get between the desks or ducking under a hanging light fixture. But at least the place was blessedly clear of broken glass. Oni Lee went first to shove a way through the debris, then Circus, then Wharf Rat. Following him was Gambler, then Panacea, then Parian, then Trainwreck. Danny gave short terse directions to lead Oni Lee towards the stairwell.

"It's going to be locked down in the power outage, I trust that's not a problem?" Danny said. Oni Lee grabbed the handle and pulled, hard, yanking the latch open with a squeal of stainless steel meeting its match. The panel sagged on its hinges, and the small squad moved in, heading upwards. "Hold up a minute," he said. The rats crawling up through the building were lagging behind, there were nearly as many obstructions inside the walls as there were out on the floors. But finally they did reach the right level, and gnawed through the sheetrock to get a good look inside.

"Damn," Danny said. "There's definitely something up. I see a bunch of mutants, lots of different kinds. Some Ravager, some Trickster, some Crawler, even some of those doppelgangers. A whole squad of Hatchet Faces over in one corner away from everyone else. And others, I think... shit. That's mutant clones of Assault and Battery. And Miss Militia, and Triumph. At least a dozen of each. I hope the Wards got away clean," he said, thinking of Taylor, "but this is gonna be tough. Probably too tough. I'm ready to go back to Leet's plan and try to re-equip down at Armsmaster's workshop. We're probably going to need nano-weapons or new armor before we're ready for this."

They backtracked down the stairs, quietly and carefully. The floor with the workshop was empty of anything but bodies and breakage, and they moved quickly and confidently to the door. Wharf Rat knocked on the door, and called out for Armsmaster.

"Fuck off," came Colin's voice.

"We'd rather resupply, then go kill those things two floor up," Danny replied. "We accidentally lost the nano-saws you gave us earlier, and we're gonna need them if we're tackling all of them."

"So they got you too, huh Danny," Colin said, sounding weary. "Screw it. Whole damn city's a lost cause."

"Nobody got me," Danny said. "When I left Lamia, everything was going fine and the team had everything under control."

There was a pause. "Lamia?"

"The big damn snake-woman. Noelle, they were calling her. The thing in the wall that the Travelers were protecting. Say, Armsmaster, do you, uh, do you have Benthic in there?"

"So, Noelle, Lamia, that's the only one you know about?"

"The only what?"

"Never mind. Who do you have with you?"

"Panacea. Uber and Leet. Parian, Oni Lee, Trainwreck and Circus. And Dinah Alcott."

"All right," Colin's voice came. "I'm gonna open the door. Because if they got you, and Dinah, and Oni Lee, this is all over anyway."

The vault door slid up out of its locks and then rolled aside, braced in the reinforced wall. Armsmaster stood in the doorway, his massive construction armor even more impressive than the last time Danny had seen it. "Hmm. You all do seem all right," he said, staring back and forth across the nine of them. "No deformities, all dressed in some clothes that would be hard to fake up. The odds they'd be able to dummy you all up right is pretty slight." He tapped a control, and the hazy barrier between him and them dissipated. "Get in quick, I need to lock this up," he said, and the armor's giant waldo-arms waved them to enter. He flinched back from Panacea before she lifted the Crawler-face away from her own like a hood, opening the suit halfway.

Danny's eyes scanned across the room. He ignored the equipment and weapons and looked at the people. Gallant and Aegis were sitting close together, both of them clearly injured. Aegis was missing an arm and half a leg, his face showing the skull across half of it. Gallant was sitting on his good side, his face slashed in dozens of places and crudely bandaged. Dauntless sat on a bench, his elbows on his knees, his head hanging, seeming daunted for the first time. Velocity was fidgeting next to some racks of weapons. No Taylor. No Flechette, or Bonesaw. Armsmaster was locking the door back down, faster than he'd opened it.

"So what happened upstairs?" Danny asked.

"They teleported in and took the lobby immediately," Dauntless said. "The elevators, the motor pool. They started working their way up. Every non-powered human they got, they killed and dragged away to feed that monster. Triumph and Miss Militia were with Gallant and Aegis, interrogating Burnscar. They held the subhumans off for a few minutes while Aegis and Gallant escaped, and shot Burnscar dead just before they were overwhelmed. The subhumans worked their way up the building level by level, I was evacuating people from the executive floor. Velocity had to abandon the Hub and come up here, I was the last one in. They've tried to break in, tried to get us to open the door. It feels like a week, it's only been a few hours."

"We've had an eye on the surroundings for a bit," Velocity said. "We planted cameras during the scare with Faultline, and they've got their own power source so we could tap into those. We've had to leave the lights off, we try to convince them that we're dead in here or gone, so they'll leave us alone. We saw when the Wards came close, saw what happened, and they left towards the south. We saw Flechette and your d- saw Benthic show up a couple blocks over with Bonesaw, but they left too. We couldn't communicate with them, anything we make with a microphone or a speaker is going to be destroyed instantly."

"Not anymore," Leet said, reaching into his bag and pulling out the flat box of his resonant-frequency canceller. "This shuts off all Shatterbird powers. We can get comms working again."

"Fucking finally," Armsmaster said, reaching for a handful of components.

Panacea was treating Gallant's wounds, sealing the lacerations and prompting his body to replace the blood more quickly. Then she moved over to Aegis, and tried to decide where to start. "The only spare biomass I have is the Crawler suit," she said. "I'm not sure what would happen if I fused it to your body to replace your limbs. It could kill you and turn into a full-fledged Crawler."

"You just need biomass?" Danny said. "Like, living meat and bone that you can alter to heal him?"

"That's right," Panacea said, nodding.

"Armsmaster, could you open the door just enough to let in a couple dozen rats?" Danny said.

"You're going to need those rats," Aegis pointed out. He sounded very calm and reasonable for someone who had no less than five obviously lethal injuries.

"You're going to need arms and legs and a face," Danny countered.

Aegis shrugged, and spread his hands in surrender. "Okay, I won't push the issue."

"So what did they do with the parahumans they caught?" Trainwreck asked. "How did they get those copies upstairs? You talked about them killing the unpowered and taking the powered ones, so did they teleport them back to Lamia then teleport them back here?"

"What?" Dauntless asked, looking up. "What, no. No, they used the other Noelles they brought here."

The room was swept with a sudden shock of silence, broken only by the pattering of rat claws entering the room. "I beg your fucking pardon," Trainwreck said. "It sounded like you said they've got more Noelles and they brought them here."

"Yeah," Velocity said. "About three of them upstairs. One looks like a Hatchetface, one looks like a Crawler, and one looks like a girl. But they've all got these legs covered with eyes and mouths, sort of an early version of the main one, the Lamia. And there are three more out there somewhere, away from here."

Danny sagged against the wall, letting out a slow heartfelt "Ffffuuuuuuuuuuuucck."

"Remember when you said that the hard part was done and it wasn't going to keep getting worse?" Uber said, elbowing him in the shoulder. "Remember that part? Huh?"

Danny thumped his head against the wall as he thought, working his brain. "Okay. Armsmaster, do you have enough nano-weapons to vaporize the top levels of this building?"

"About halfway there already, and I could catch up fast," the tinker said, his hands still working quickly to build a set of communicators for the team. "But if you do that, we lose Assault, Battery, Triumph and Miss Militia. We have to try to save them."

"Of course," Danny said, knowing that if he hesitated even slightly then that was likely to be the last assistance he ever got from Armsmaster or any of the others. "I just want to have a backup plan, and also a credible threat I can use as a bargaining position."

Colin's face was incredulous. "You want to talk to them. Like Circus and Trainwreck."

"Not like that," Danny said. "I'm negotiating the release of hostages. I need a dialogue to do that." He was more than tempted to just liquidate everything above the workshop and be done with it. He could seriously believe that losing four heroes was a small price to pay for losing a dozen evil clones of each one, plus the Hatchet Faces and the Crawlers and all the rest. Hell, losing four heroes was a small price to pay just to kill the three Noelles upstairs. But to Colin these were his friends, and he would not brook that sort of talk, Danny knew.

Just like he knew that this was going to be ugly and brutal. But there was no room for mercy or hesitation.

A single rat slipped out of a vent and scrambled to the boardroom that the mutants were using for their headquarters. It was a massive room, more so with the giant table smashed to pieces and thrown out the windows. Hatchet Faces were not allowed in here, they were a distraction and an obstacle. The mahogany paneling on one wall was almost obscured by containment foam, holding Assault and his wife Battery and Miss Militia and Triumph all fastened upright to the wall. Triumph's mouth was sealed shut with more foam. They were all bruised and battered, Assault had two black eyes, and the rest of them glared hatefully at the room full of clones. Most of the clones here were of themselves, their own faces repeated several times over and grinning as they chatted amiably about horrific tortures and widespread slaughter. And in three posh lounges where the Noelles, just as Velocity had described. One humanoid Crawler, one gray-skinned Hatchet Face, and one girl that could have been the sister of the girl from the sewer tunnel. The rat dropped his payload and scrambled to a vent, ducking out of sight.

And then the Druid appeared, in full regalia, standing right in the room. A half-dozen Miss Militia clones whirled, guns raised and fingers tense on the triggers. Their powers did not make them any clothes, but they were perpetually armed. They favored heavy weapons, assault shotguns and bazookas and a tripod-mounted machine gun. "Hold up," one of the Batteries said, stepping forward. "It's a hologram, that's all," she said. "What do you want, Rat?"

"I'm here to negotiate the release of hostages," he said. "But it's hard to know where I stand. Are you the sort that believes that one should always execute one hostage outright just to establish that you're serious?"

"Oh, maybe I do believe that," Battery said, nodding to a Miss Militia, who pointed her auto-shotgun at Assault's head, shoving the barrel into his cheek hard enough to bruise. "Time to grovel, Rat, you're going to have to offer a lot if you want these four back."

"I wasn't clear," the Druid said, inclining his head. "I'm not here to negotiate the release of your hostages to me. I want you to negotiate my hostages from me." And then a white flash ensconced the leftmost Noelle, the Crawler clone with the horrific legs covered in sharp-fanged mouths and bloodshot eyes. As soon as the white flash faded, he began falling apart, as if every part of his body was rejecting every other part, breaking down to chunks then slivers then a thin soup that soaked into the carpet.

"It came from the floor!" the Battery clone bellowed, waving at the others to move forward. An Assault smashed the floor to reveal the crawlspace beneath, and the spent remains of one of Bakuda's bombs. The other two Noelles scrambled away from the spot, stumbling backwards.

"That one came from the floor," Druid said, folding his hands behind his back. "Now, nobody leaves. I've already got the exits covered. I'll consider letting hostages leave if you can give me something of equal or greater value."

"Like what?" the girl Noelle growled, her hair hanging in front of her face.

"There were six of you, and only three, I mean two, of you are here," Danny said. "Tell me where to find the other three, and I'll let these two go. I'll hunt you down later, but at least you'll be alive and free for a while. A day's worth of safety from me and the Protectorate. If we have a deal."

"Don't do it," the naked Battery clone said. She was mostly accurate, except that half her hair was missing and her scalp was covered in a thorny lumpy mess, and one of her legs looked to be about three inches short. "He's bluffing. For this kind of thing, you can raise the stakes. Tell you what, Druid man, if we give you that information, you let these two go and you promise to never hunt them or hurt them ever again."

"You're wasting my time with that kind of deal," Danny said, waving it away. "Each one of these Noelles is a walking genocide, why would I voluntarily let two of them go? Only if I know it's temporary, and that I'm getting a permanent solution to the other three. But first, I've got a question for the Noelles: has any of you or your creator had a tattoo of a C kind of tipped on its back side, halfway like a U?"

"Oh," the Battery clone snickered. "You mean Cauldron."

"I do."

"Oh, that's funny," the girl Noelle said. "No, none of us were ever branded by Cauldron, but all of this did start when we took one of their potions and got transformed."

"But funny enough," Battery added, "that's not even the reason that Cauldron is not going to let the Protectorate or the PRT help you out here, Ratman. It's because Shatterbird is being protected by Cauldron. She's one of their operatives, and Cauldron thinks her life is important enough to tell Battery Number One here to break her vows and make sure that Shatterbird goes free."

"Really?" said a Triumph with a loose-fitting jaw and a cluster of tumors around his chest and throat that looked like the wattle of a turkey. "I thought it was because the Ratman here has been snooping around Cauldron business. They're rather famous for punishing anyone that gets into their business."

"Siberian was a Cauldron too," Druid added. "He had the tattoo on the back of his hand."

"Siberian was a woman," the Noelle girl said. "And she didn't have any tattoos but those stripes."

Druid barked a laugh. "Seriously? You need to talk to some of your Crawlers about that, they know more than you do. But enough stalling, I want the location of the last three Noelles. And for wasting my time, only one of you gets to go free when I get what I want."

"How about one of us goes free when we give you the locations, and we trade the other one for your friends here?" the Battery clone said, gesturing towards the mahogany wall that had the containment foam and four holes in it. "What the hell?"

"You didn't think I wasn't working on a rescue, did you?" Druid said. "My teammates are already safe and sound. Now, one of you can live through this day, or you all die here. And my patience is running out."

The Hatchet Face Noelle looked at the girl, and nodded. She sighed. "Okay. One is stealing a boat and heading up the coast towards New York. One is going overland to the south, hitchhiking or hijacking, heading for Florida. The third is hiding in the city, laying low, ready to pop up in a couple weeks and start this whole process over again just when people thought they were safe."

"Thank you," Danny said. "I honestly didn't expect you to tell the truth, but you did. Okay, you two pick which one of you lives through this. Everyone else dies, but at least it'll be quick."

"Oh, it's him," the Noelle girl said, jerking her head towards the Hatchet Face version of herself. "But one thing before we part ways, hologram-man. One of our Ravagers that we set loose here in the executive floors; he had a neat knack. Instead of a clairvoyant link to anyone he hurt and festering wounds, he would instead get a sort of memory download from anyone he psychologically tormented. We learned a lot. If you want answers about Cauldron, talk to your Chief Director."

"If the stakes were less high and the timeline less crucial, I'd take you prisoner just to learn what you know," Danny said. "But that won't happen today. Okay, the nanite disassemblers are turned on. There's about a minute until this entire floor of the building is destroyed. We will allow one, and only one, person to escape by jumping out the window. Anyone after the first one gets vaporized."

"Shit," the Battery clone said, looking around at her comrades. "Well, maybe the other three will be luckier."

The Hatchet Face clone strode to the window and did not even look back, he simply dove over the edge towards the water of the Bay. And then the floor shifted under their feet, rippling and warping as the structure was turned to smoke and dust. The carpet vanished in a haze, and then the screaming started. And then the hologram projector was destroyed.

"Jesus," Colin sighed. "We just evaporated a significant portion of our own headquarters."

"And about a hundred murderous parahumans," Parian reminded him. "And rescued the hostages, and found the other three Noelles."

Danny nodded. "Dauntless, can you get what's left of your team and go after the hitchhiker? I can get my squad and take out the stowaway. Then we can return and root out the last one in her hidey-hole."

The golden-armored hero hauled his head upright, his shoulders still hunched as he slouched on the bench. His eyes had a haunted look. "I don't think they were lying, Danny. I think the PRT might have sold us out. They should have at least sent someone to touch base and make contact. If they didn't want to support us, they should have at least sent someone to make an evaluation and see if we were exaggerating. But they didn't send anyone, it's just us. I think maybe Shatterbird is more important to Cauldron than the whole city of Brockton Bay."

"I promise I'll sit right with you and worry about all of that as soon as we've killed all the Noelles and their spawn," Danny said. "But we need to do the right thing first."

Armsmaster stepped forward, the cockpit rotating to put Kid Win up to the front. "Hey, it should be easy to track them on the road," the Ward said. "With the city locked down there won't be many cars, and there's only a few roads out to the south. And we've got a lot of Wards still unaccounted for. We have no idea where Clockblocker, Vista, Browbeat, Benthic or Flechette are at. And come to think of it, I haven't seen Mouse Protector in hours. That's six potential captives who could be getting turned into an evil army."

"Yeah, boss, c'mon, time is of the essence," Velocity said, bumping the other man.

Dauntless dropped his head, staring at the floor again. "If it's so damn easy, you guys will be fine on your own. But if the PRT really did sell us out? How hard do you work to save a city that nobody wants to save? If nobody else cares?"

"God," Battery said, half a sob in her voice. Assault stepped towards her with his arms out to hug her, but she flickered away in a blur of superspeed. She zoomed to the far side of the room, her back in a corner and her arms wrapped around her stomach. "I... I don't want to be touched," she said, quavering.

"We're all just... just fucked," Dauntless murmured.

"He'll bounce back," Danny said, speaking loudly to drown out the other man's maudlin ramblings. "You guys, take the VTOL and go hit those roads. Use nanites to kill the Noelle, you can't take any chances. We'll take Parian's magic carpet out over the bay and find that one. We rendezvous here whenever we're done."

Panacea turned loose of Assault as she finished healing the man, and he joined his wife and Miss Militia and Triumph standing awkwardly near the door. Armsmaster/Kid Win led the way out the door, with Velocity, Gallant and Aegis following after. Dauntless sat alone on the bench, staring down at his hands. Danny led the way as his team made for the stairs: Trainwreck and Circus, Uber and Leet, Parian and Panacea, himself and Gambler. They walked up to the open space of the top floor, now bare to the night sky. Oni Lee teleported to them, sheathing his nano-saws. He and Danny shared a nod, and that was all they needed to confirm that the Hatchet Face Noelle was not going to bother anyone else.

He had promised safety from himself and the heroes. But his team was not him, and they were not heroes. He was not going to get worked again like he had with the Undersiders.

Author's note: I'm sorry for the typos that crop up, and I appreciate those that point them out to me. I tend to type more quickly than is entirely good for me, and I don't review thoroughly enough. I tend to rely on spellcheckers, and that means that homonyms can slip by me if I'm not paying attention. Again, thank you to those that help me with that, and thank you to those who bear with me through such obvious mistakes. And thank you to those who post their theories for my little cliffhangers, about half the time those comments show me what I should have done. I'll keep doing my best.