"Keep your fire out of my face!"

"Keep your face out of my fire!"

Hiccup lifted his eyes to the ceiling and rubbed the back of his neck with exasperation. "Rumble. Tumble." Pulling the mouthpiece to his headset closer to his lips, he returned his gaze to the screen in front of him. "Stop fighting for five seconds so I can listen to Dex."

Using the micro soundboard at his right, he faded out their mics and amped the volume on Rolodexter's. In his ear, he could hear crumbling concrete and the faint noise of Twist's mutterings. Her volume never got turned down. "Okay. One more time, Dex." Hiccup brushed away Toothless as the cat wandered lazily in front of his keyboard.

"I said, 'I think the Berserker is preparing to utilize an inductively coupled plasma blast'!" The young genius was obviously trying to pinch his official League badge higher so that Hiccup could hear, but it only served in making his voice staticky and screechy. Still, though. It had been clear enough. "Any ideas?"

"Oh gods," he swallowed, feeling his heart suddenly clench with dread. His pulse picked up a frantic rhythm, and he raked his fingers through his hair. "You're- you're sure?" The twins and Twist both heard the panic in his voice and started blurting questions, but he knocked down their mics so he could focus.

"About eighty-six percent positive," Rolodexter answered on a squeak. There was a crashing noise on his side of the line.

"Turn on your eyes for me."

Hiccup pushed his rolling chair to the other side of his counter, knotting his hands in his hair as the small screen designated for Dex's contacts flickered to life. It took a minute for the blinking stabilizers to kick in, but then Hiccup's own eyes were widening as he took in the sight of the giant robot tearing through Berk. It was at least six stories tall, with a shiny horned head and what looked like oversized cannons for fists. It shot a flash of light towards Rumble, who froze a geysering fire hydrant to absorb the blast.

"See here?" Rolodexter's gloved hand appeared on the screen as he tapped a place on the robot's chest. He circled what looked like a on old school film projector reel in the machine's armor, except this one was made of molded steel and spinning blindingly fast, and the circle appeared on Hiccup's screen. Dex then drew two arrows pointing up to the shoulders and then down each arm. "If I'm right, one of these arms is creating a time-varying electric current. The other produces a time-varying magnetic field. All fancy science talk aside, if the two combine, we're looking at a plasma similar to the surface of the sun."

Hiccup's head spun. He felt a little breathless. "Okay. Uh." Pinching the bridge of his nose, he tried to wrack his brain for a solution. "What would we need to do make the city not burn in a fiery blaze."

"Ideally? Stop his processors. But Twist can't get close enough without getting shredded, and the new thing you made for Strongarm is making slow progress on the shoulder joints."

He watched the screen with horror as Snotlout ducked out of the way of a miniature rocket. The projectile missed and exploded midair, but it dislodged his cousin and his hold on the giant robot's neck. Strongarm went flying, and Twist just managed to stretch up to catch him in time. The laser gun Hiccup had snuck him, however, was flung out of sight.

"Tinker? Tinker, can you hear me?"

Hiccup shook his head, snapping out of his distraction. "Yeah, loud and clear, Dex." His heart was a pain in his ribs as it slammed adrenaline through his system. He wondered if he had a super's biology, if the panic would hurt this much. "How much time do we have?"

"Uhh..." On screen, the living machine's chest began to glow with a suppressed light. "Three minutes?"

"Damn it." Hiccup slid back to his main screen, tapping out of Rolodexter's contacts page until he could pull up his tech menu. His hand shot out to fix Astrid's volume. "Twist. You hear me?"

"Hey, Tink." She sounded out of breath, but not afraid. The calm in her voice was like a balm compared to Fishlegs' anxiety.

"I need you to get Strongarm to Rumble. Rumble, go ahead and be taking off your cuffs."

In the background, he could hear the heroine's confused complaining, but it was just barely audible over the high-pitched whirring that was beginning to sound over all of their voices. When Astrid spoke again, he could hear all of their microphones overlapping. It was distracting him, and Hiccup had to take a deep breath.

"Okay, what are we doing?"

Hiccup's fingers tapped across the touch screen, making minor adjustments to the cuffs he'd invented for Rumble as one of his first League inventions. They were basically giant vacuums for energy that could freeze a gush of water in a second- it wasted less of Ruffnut's energy so that she could perform longer. Now it would have to function at high gear.

"I've turned down as much as I can from this side," he told the group. "Have Strongarm open the cuffs at the seam as gently as he can. There should be some flexibility, but we don't want them to snap." Blood and high pitched whirs filled his ears as the teens followed his directions. A bright red "WARNING" flashed over Rumble's Ice Cuffs' page, but he tapped ignore.

"How much do you need them open?" he heard Snot ask into one of the others' badges.

"As straight as you can get without breaking the coils or snapping any of the wiring." He hoped his tone didn't sound as terrified to them as it did to him.

"Tinker!"

Hiccup's head snapped up at the sound of Dex's shriek- when he looked to the screen receiving images from the hero's contacts, ice froze in his veins. The robot had stopped paying attention to the group of heroes, but now it was putting its hand-like appendages together. It was about to blow.

"Okay, Twist, you're going to have to make them work." He was shaking. It was just him and his cat in his high-tech, air-conditioned lab, and meanwhile, his only friends were about to be blown to bits. There was no telling how much death and destruction was about to ensue. Not for the first time, he cursed his normalcy.

"What do you need, Tink?" There was a twinge of nervousness to her voice now. It didn't soothe.

"I need those cuffs in that robot. One in each arm. Can you get up there?" His fingers felt like they were about to break his headset, he was holding it so tightly.

Astrid was quiet for a moment, and then she said, "I'm on it."

Hiccup looked back to the visuals. Static was beginning to cut across the images, but he could see Twist stretching towards the giant machine. "Dex. Dex, what's going on with your contacts?"

"I don't know-" His voice was barely audible over the sharp screech of the building plasma. "-not working?"

"The picture's going snowy on me."

The last thing he saw was Twist's blonde ponytail bouncing over her shoulders as she climbed the robot's let. Then it all went gray. He couldn't see. He could hardly hear. The high-pitched noise was becoming so loud, he cried out in pain and threw the headset off. Even his main screen flickered, and Toothless began to meow pathetically. Hiccup slammed his eyes shut and shoved his hands over his ears.

And then suddenly- nothing.

No screech, no flickering, no perturbed cat noises. The monitor used for Rolodexter's contacts flashed back to a blank screen, which read only, "Error: Device Not Connected."

Hiccup shook. The air in his lungs rushed past his frozen lips on something like a near-sob. His hands felt numb, and a faint ringing still echoed around his head. "Guys?" he whispered. With fingers trembling so badly he could hardly navigate, he flipped through all of their tech stats. Every single one of their devices had a bright red "WARNING".

Hiccup's throat felt tight. He shook his head and knotted his hands in his hair. Then, scrambling from his chair, he pushed away from the counter, nearly tripping over his work table. He sprinted up the stairs and nearly broke down the Forge door shoving past it. His ankle caught painfully in the doorway on its swing shut, but he just righted himself and limped forward. The Forge stairs opened to the Tower's main room, where six screens played the news from several different local stations.

Hiccup slowed to a stop beside Tuffnut's favorite chair. He all but collapsed to the floor. A painful wave of relief shook him to see the smiling face of a reporter as she spoke over a shot of a firetruck hosing down the robot's blackened remains. But then the sight in the bottom right of the screen made his eyes widen.

"Twist."