1.10

-- Tanya von Degurechaff --

I rolled sideways and diagonally upwards while aiming my rifle, decoys splaying out and mirroring my movements. He's invincible so long as he's touching Siberian, but how far does that go? He'd actually continued trying to speak after attacking me, but he hadn't managed two syllables by the time I'd finished charging my spell and fired.

With less than a second to work, the optical formula wasn't too impressive in terms of power output, and in fact looked rather anemic. Of course, the actual appearance of the beam was just the visual spectrum 'tracer.' The bulk of the energy of the formula was relayed via a more efficient high frequency beam. At this range, *very* high frequency. Still, I wouldn't trust it to burn through Jack's subdermal armor in any reasonable amount of time, even without Siberian's protection. But that wasn't the goal. I'd aimed very carefully. Hitting Jack at this range was trivial, obviously, but my target was rather smaller. Without a reactive mage shell or any other form of eye protection, even this formula was strong enough by orders of magnitude to instantly blind a man.

I released the formula after a second, already repositioning under the camouflage spell while one decoy and two other instances of the camouflage spell sped off in other directions. Jack, initially taken aback by the sudden assault, stopped talking, but he didn't appear to be in any pain. By the end, he looked more annoyed than anything. I watched from just over the lip of a building across the street. The one Siberian didn't wreck. He didn't even need to blink to clear his eyes. How could that even work? Light clearly needs to enter his eyes and trigger his photoreceptors to let him see, so why can't too much light damage those photoreceptors? Well, new plan. Plans.

"Weiss, one of the PRT agents has a remote detonator for a bomb. Come down and secure it." I considered for a moment. "Don't kill any of them unless you have to. Try asking first."

While he went to work, I started scanning the area for a specific cape. Everyone had scattered at the outbreak of violence, likely believing there was no point in fighting Siberian, but his power had been distinctive to my magical senses, like a poorly made internal formula constantly leaking out through the skin. Ah, there! I anchored an illusion of a three meter wide hollow white sphere to Jack's head just as he started to talk again. I moved over my quarry's position hunkered down in a side ally, though my first sight of it made me blink. Stained padded walls, elaborate columns, and bizarre statues interspersed the street. Oh, right, the crazy one. Well, no matter.

I didn't expect the illusion on Jack to accomplish much given that -- ah, given that his power could disrupt it, as he'd just worked out, but it provided the momentary distraction I'd needed. I came up behind Newter fast, grabbing my officer's cap off my head with my left hand. No time to ask permission. I made sure my mage shell was set to block solids and gasses, just in case his power didn't work the way it appeared to, and slapped his bare arm with the cap. He startled badly, apparently having failed to notice my approach. His yelp alerted his teammates, and Spitfire produced a belated gout of flame aimed vaguely in my direction as I sped passed them and towards the Nine, camouflage illusion reapplied.

Siberian was by far the top priority, and I didn't think this would be so easy to do a second time, so I targeted her. I didn't dare get within arms reach, even if both her arms were occupied and I was pretty sure I was faster, so I just threw the cap into her face from 4 meters up, hoping her eyes and mouth might aid the drug's ingress. She leapt to catch me as soon after my throw connected, which was far too late. Her absurd power compensated for her incompetence, though, as the drug appeared to have no effect. Aren't parahuman powers supposed to have weaknesses? How does invulnerability protect against a hallucinogen? She looked a little frustrated as she touched back down impossibly lightly. Jack was starting to look genuinely angry. He slashed at the air with a knife as I sped away, dispelling a camouflaged decoy.

They're frustrated? Perfect immunity to any sort of harm isn't good enough? In my justified frustration, I quickly charged and fired an artillery spell at their feet, hoping to at least disrupt their footing. Naturally, she'd extended her invulnerability into the ground and, defeated by an intense flare of foreign magic, the spell accomplished nothing beyond interrupting Jack yet again. Though, actually, wasn't it a little odd I hadn't been able to sense any magic in the ground until I tried to damage it? She's not nearly quick enough to have reacted to me, so the process of reinforcement has to be automatic, but I didn't sense any mechanism that might handle that.

Koenig interrupted my contemplation, "Ma'am, fire spotted by the boardwalk. Should we investigate?"

"Negative. Weiss, status?"

"I have the device, Colonel."

Good, because I was running out of other ideas.

"Koenig, Granz, distract and harass. Weiss, Be ready to activate it on my signal."

Hatchet Face's corpse was far too heavy to just toss at the group. I remembered exactly where I'd placed the bomb, but it'd still take a couple seconds to get it out, and my camouflage formula would be useless at ground level. Siberian was lifting Bonesaw back onto her shoulders, presumably so she'd have a free arm to throw things at me, but she was suitably distracted when Granz placed a low power artillery spell right on Bonesaw's head. I dismissed my camouflage decoys and sent out four of the traditional sort, sloppier than usual, straining my mental bandwidth for superior redundancy. Sticking my hand in the corpse would be obviously suspicious no matter how many decoys I had, so the goal was more to distract than to trick. Not wanting to give them a moment to adjust, I darted in, quickly placing an active barrier between me and the group as I rummaged for the bomb.

A supersonic crack followed immediately by a worrying dip in my barrier's strength jerked my head up just as my fingers closed around it. Siberian had evidently thrown a chunk of pavement at me with enough power to go straight through a standard mage shell and kill the mage inside. Absurd. A Flak 16, an anti-air gun the size of a van operated by an eight man crew, couldn't do that in a single shot. Well, maybe it could at 5 meters. No way pavement thrown hard enough to crumble under air resistance would have decent ballistics at range, though, which was where I should be. Bomb secure, I rocketed upwards, pouring manna into flight and body reinforcement to survive the extreme acceleration, long gone by the time Siberian's follow up shattered my active barrier. Granz sent another artillery spell into the group, though at this point they were mostly ignoring them. What was Koenig doing? He's been charging something for more than 6 seconds at this point. He does remember no amount of power will actually hurt them, right?

Just as I thought that he cast the spell, sending two dozen green blobs dodging erratically through the air. Good thinking. I attached a matching illusion to myself, little more than a strong blur effect, as I devoted myself to hacking the homing formula for use on the bomb. Not enormously difficult, but a dropped sphere needed a different approach than a fast-moving spin-stabilized aerodynamic bullet. By the time I finished, Jack was waving his knife around wildly, like he was trying to fend off an unimpressed bear, mouth moving like he was still trying to talk this out, and Siberian was throwing anything she could get her hands on, missing a lot more often than not. An undignified end for the villains villains fear, but such is war. I released the bomb, tracking its progress through the air more with my magic sense than my eyes, infinitely more sensitive to my own magic than that of others.

"Weiss, now!"

Rather than the instant vitrification I'd expected, a perfect black sphere encompassed the group for a moment before vanishing just as quickly, accomplishing noth... Where's Siberian? Jack stumbled as Bonesaw fell to the ground, unsupported. Vicious satisfaction played over my face as my rifle snapped up. Maybe it didn't do everything advertised, but this was good enough.

"Another bomb for Bonesaw!" I shouted onto the open channel for the benefit of the Protectorate's mages, waiting as my artillery spell charged sufficiently to guarantee the kill.

Then Siberian reappeared, two meters away from her teammates and seeming a little disoriented, but she looked to be catching on fast. Fuck! I'd considered that Being X was getting more blatant, but this was beyond the pale! At least the mages he sent against me stayed dead when killed! Nothing for it. I shot the artillery spell before it was ready, still far more than enough to kill a normal man, but I couldn't be sure it would completely destroy the brain without a direct hit, which-- no, the shot went a little low, taking him in the neck. Such a vigorous decapitation would normally fill me with the satisfaction of a job well done, but it didn't feel like a victory as Siberian leapt to catch the head before scooping up Bonesaw and, pushing off a street sign, shot away into the city.