"Where's the next disturbance?" demanded Sk8r Girl, turning sharply to the left at the intersection, leaving behind a half-dozen men lying on the side of the road, thick knots on their heads. The police should be less than two minutes away. She frowned under her helmet. It was bad enough that three arrondissements were now in flames (metaphorically, at least, she added mentally. For now.); now, all the unrest was starting to spill over into the rest of the city! This was the second group of looters she had been sent to investigate tonight… and it was barely eight.

It was going to be a long night.

"Two kilometers to the north," reported Impèratrice Pourpre. "A drone spotted two men loitering outside a bank; one is holding a brick."

"We're on it," Capricorn answered, putting on a burst of speed and sprinting past Sk8r Girl, launching himself at the side of the apartment building in front of him and catching the railing of a third-floor balcony with his shepherd's staff to swing himself up higher.

Sk8r Girl let out an annoyed grunt as Capricorn crested the top of the building and sprinted out of sight. "Showoff," she grumbled under her breath before leaning forward and pressing a button on her glove to activate the skates' thrusters. With a roar she rocketed forward, skipped off the curb, and flew down the street, Capricorn's profile on the rooftops just barely in sight.

A flash lit up the evening to the north; a white shimmering wall appeared for a moment and flickered out. In that brief moment, Sk8r Girl caught a quick glimpse of a pair of winged figures swooping around and diving toward a figure on the roof of a building.

"What the hell!?" she shouted, staring in that direction for another look at the flying people. Someone shouted, almost directly in front of her, and she quickly leaned to one side, barely avoiding a head-on collision with an oncoming truck.

"Focus on the bank," Pegasus ordered her, his voice laced with stress. "Hato Gozen and Albailier are tracking down someone with an unknown device. They have struck two cars and a convenience store already; motives unclear."

Sk8r Girl groaned. "Fine." Refocusing her attention on the street in front of her, she forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply, centering herself in this specific moment. Ordinarily, she would be the calm, cool one, the one to apply logic to the situation. But after a week of this mayhem, the stress was starting to take its toll on all of them. The first day of the rioting, the Heroes of Paris had gone in force to try to quell it – only for someone to throw a Molotov cocktail at the back of Ladybug's head. Fortunately, Ryoku had spotted the bottle in time; unfortunately, she had used her power to launch it directly back at the source. The bottle had burst over a car, setting it on fire, and it had all gone downhill from there. After that, while a few of the heroes had ventured into the protest zone – Nabatala, the Owl, Elementa, and Olivet chief among them – to do what they could to protect the innocent bystanders caught up in the chaos, the rest of the Heroes of Paris had remained at the periphery, trying to keep the rioting and looting contained until it could run its course. Ladybug had assured them that she would be able to repair all the damage once the violence had stopped. Sk8r Girl had her doubts.

All of that had changed tonight. Suddenly, the violence was no longer contained to those three arrondissements. It had expanded into the rest of the city. And now the Heroes of Paris couldn't sit on the sidelines any longer.

How the hell were they supposed to stop this?

Capricorn's voice over the communicator jolted Sk8r Girl back into the present. "It looks like there's just two of them here," he announced. "Shouldn't be too much trouble to–"

"Capricorn?" Sk8r Girl's stomach clenched, her eyes widening. "What's–"

"H–hel–" Capricorn gasped out, the syllable cut off and almost too quiet for Sk8r Girl to hear.

"What's going on there, Pegasus?" Sk8r Girl demanded, accelerating even faster down the street until she was whipping past parked vehicles so fast they turned into nothing but blurs of color.

"It–it's the Dark Acolytes!" Impèratrice Pourpre's gasp was audible. "They must have been baiting us, hoping a miraculous user would come to stop them!"

"Talk to me," ordered Sk8r Girl, drifting to one side to start her turn.

"Capricorn is frozen on the sidewalk, staff up to shield himself," Pegasus informed her curtly. There was a pause. "He saw the chi-putty coming and blocked it – the chi-putty is on the staff, 4 centimeters below his hand. The Dark Acolytes appear to be searching him for his miraculous." He let out a breath. "You do not have much time."

"And I already have a Champion trying to stop a fire," Impèratrice Pourpre groaned.

"Sync the drone with my HUD." Sk8r Girl's eyes narrowed in concentration, and she slipped a softball out of the pouch on her back. "I've got this."

"I have three drones on standby," Pegasus responded. "Basic unarmed models, however. The surviving advanced drones are occupied in the protest zone."

Sk8r Girl's lip curled as the HUD superimposed a visual representation of the alleyway just ahead of her. The three drones flashed bright blue; Capricorn appeared green, with the two Dark Acolytes as red. The two red figures circled around the green, poking and prodding everywhere they could, mercifully ignoring the two horns protruding from his hair. Mentally, Sk8r Girl commanded her helmet's processor to run the trajectory and velocity calculations. The street in front of her lit up with a brilliant yellow dot; the moment her front wheels reached the dot, she threw all her weight to the left and launched into a sharp turn. The three figures came into view halfway down the street; the three drones' infrared lights showed them forming a triangle around the scene. One of the Dark Acolytes glanced up at Capricorn's head and pointed at something. The other reached up to touch his horns.

Now or never.

"Give me a flash of light from Drone… Three," Sk8r Girl told Pegasus, tightening her grip on her field hockey stick and adjusting her fingers on the softball. "In 3… 2… 1…"

The white light illuminated the street opposite Sk8r Girl, just as the Dark Acolyte's fingers wrapped around one of Capricorn's hair-clip horns. With a cry, the Dark Acolyte raised his hand to shield his eyes, turning away from the bright light. At that same moment, Sk8r Girl released the softball, following the arc laid into her HUD, and turned away even before it struck the wall and ricocheted. Taking her field hockey stick in both hands, she swung in an upward stroke when she was a meter away from Capricorn. Time seemed to slow down around her, as the end of the field hockey stick grazed Capricorn's staff four centimeters from his hand and slammed up into the Dark Acolyte's chin. The softball struck the other Dark Acolyte in the nose at the same moment, and Capricorn, suddenly freed from the chi-putty's hold, spun his staff once while twisting at the hips and lowering the staff's crook to catch the Dark Acolyte behind him by the ankle. Both Dark Acolytes fell in a crumpled heap, and Sk8r Girl flipped around to drop to one knee on the one's chest while Capricorn pinned the other with his staff.

"Thanks," Capricorn told her, panting heavily. He grimaced. "I… guess I shouldn't have run ahead the way I did," he admitted sheepishly. "Uh… sorry."

Sk8r Girl shrugged. "I'm not the one who almost lost a miraculous over it," she pointed out. "Mistakes were made. Lessons were learned?" Capricorn nodded. "And dumbasses were concussed. All in all, a pretty good night's work, right?"

"True."

"Actually, I should probably thank you for distracting them so I could take them out so easily." She snorted. "That's probably the fastest I've managed to take out two of these chuckleheads yet!"

Capricorn grinned. "All according to our plan, right?"

"Absolutely," she told him, deadpan, taking out two pairs of cuffs and snapping them on the Dark Acolytes' wrists before connecting them together and securing them to the streetlight next to them. "Now you can keep your other friends company in prison," she informed the Dark Acolytes, one of whom shook his head groggily and glared up at her.

"We'll stop you miraculous abusers yet!" he spat, baring his teeth. "The Dark Acolytes will not be cowed!"

Sk8r Girl folded her arms and gave him a deadpan look. "You just got taken out in less than two seconds. With a stick. You're not going to be 'stopping' anyone, anytime soon. Honestly, you seriously need to reconsider your life choices, if this is the best you can come up with to go against the Heroes of Paris!" The man glowered at her for a long minute before wincing and leaning back against the pole, his eyes closed. Sk8r Girl smirked. "That's what I thought. Now, you two be good. The cops'll be here to pick you up in a few minutes. And in the meantime–" She let out a wolfish howl that was answered almost immediately "–a few of my friends will keep you company."

As the two of them were walking away, Capricorn glanced over at Sk8r Girl guiltily. "So…"

Sk8r Girl stifled a laugh. "You want to use this in a comic, don't you."

He nodded. "The way you took out those two Dark Acolytes…"

"And you don't want to admit that you got yourself in trouble." She shook her head ruefully. "If you want to say that this was the plan all along, I won't tell Nath otherwise!"