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Once again, Ethan was playing second fiddle to the better powers. Shane had reprimanded him enough times about wanting the limelight, but it didn't change the envy when the showstopper abilities always seemed to favor everyone else. He liked being the hero. He liked being the guy people looked to and thought of as "the strongest of East's subnaturals."
These were things that bolstered his ego in ways no consolatory words could and he knew better than to pretend the achievement of saving others was enough to satisfy him.
He liked the glory for glory's sake.
It was childish, but there it was. Now he was left with detail work, after the new kids handily demolished what had taken his team a day and more to hem towards manageable amounts before they met their stalemate. Several frustrated shots of light scorched the dense metal of Factory's sphere as he and Genevieve approached the downed enemy. Also the work of the new kids. It nagged at his pride that without Shane their group had almost no meaningful stopping power in a decent timeframe. During simpler days when he had the luxury of being angry at insignificant things, Ethan would have raged at his online teammates if they had tried taking down the enemy team without a proper carry. Then his powers had appeared and he had gone with the flow under the impression that everything would settle soon enough and he'd be lauded as a hero once he had murdered enough monsters and obliterated enough enemy subnaturals.
He pretended to examine the remnants of the partially mechanized body in the sphere's center, jaw and a fist clenched.
"Is this him?" Genevieve's voice reminded him to save the self-pity for a different moment, when he could wallow in peace.
"Is what him?"
She pointed at the face on the ground.
Ethan didn't give it more than a passing glance.
"Guess so. You should send a picture back to the Institute. See if they have any records on him."
The young girl nodded, unfazed by a decapitated head whose face had fallen off. She adjusted her light headphones as one hand hunted through her coat and jeans for her military issued phone. It turned up in the inner pocket of her duffle coat, and a few quick snapshots of the face from various angles followed.
"...When do you think Shane will wake up?" she asked, watching the uploading bar tick slowly through the percentages while faint music played through her civilian phone's bluetooth connection with the headset.
"I don't know," Ethan answered, changing the conversation abruptly with a check on Myla. "Myla, everyone okay?"
A beat of silence followed and for a moment he thought the worst.
The opening buzz of a response quickly set those fears at ease.
"We're fine, but the other team is--there're enemy subnaturals on the map, Ethan, can you help?"
"They've got it covered. And me and Gen are pretty tired."
"I'm not that tired--" Genevieve's response ended at the glare Ethan leveled her, and she narrowed her eyes in response. "I'm not tired, Myla!" she shouted at the top of her lungs, opening the line on her phone as well just to make sure.
Silence followed again, and Ethan's frown at her soon turned into the smallest hint of bared teeth.
"We won't make it there in time, anyway," he protested. "And besides, if there're enemy subs around, we've gotta keep you guys safe, then. You're sitting ducks right now."
From Myla's end, an audible sigh. Her next transmission was subdued, and fatigue creeped at the edges of her voice.
"Yeah. ...Let's regroup. We shouldn't split up if the other team is taken down."
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Brent's shot found its mark in the gargoyle girl's left eye, the projectile puncturing at an angle and embedding deep in the mage's upper, sturdier jaw.
The scream that followed was broken into wet, uneven syllables as blood dripped from the girl's nose and pooled inside her mouth.
Callan's punches had already turned the hardened skin on the side of her head black and blue, but the bullet and its subsequent agony made her convulse violently below the superhuman Arbiter.
Her arm came up again in an attempt to throw Callan off, other hand pressed uselessly against the bleeding hole where her left eye had been.
Near the APC, Marcus's attack connected and the frost mage was sent sprawling to the ground, blood streaming down the side of his head where the crowbar had broken skin on impact. He blinked, disoriented by the attack, but still possessing enough sense of mind to raise the pistol in his hand and fire blindly in his attacker's general direction, one of the bullets catching Marcus in the upper left arm where ice crystals were starting to collect and condense.
Just then, Siena's appearance and pain radiation crippled the frost mage in the area and he spat out a string of curses as he clutched at his hands and arms, eyes scanning for the culprit. Finally given the chance to notice the latest arrivals, he shot again at both Emma and Siena, the magazine emptying within seconds, but the pain searing through his arms wiped any chance of a properly aimed shot and all the bullets went wide. Further away, the blonde haired girl yelped at the sudden pain in her arms, but gritted her teeth and bore it, raising a series of sharp spikes below Siena that shot upwards, throwing the girl off her feet and nicking her legs where the wishalloy didn't protect. But the worst of it glanced off the magical armor, much to the Aberration's anger. Another series of spikes lifted under Siena again, but movement from the APC caught the blonde girl's attention and she turned quickly to deal with it.
The area around the car was growing blisteringly cold now and Lawrence's prone form nearby looked nearly frozen, his lack of movement allowing the ice particles to gather that much faster on him.
It took the older man a while to recover from the fall after the levitation field disappeared, but as he clambered back to his feet, his resolve to finish what he had set out to do was unwavering. Dean was going to need cover in order to get everyone out of dodge. Aiming his pistol at the black haired aberration who had been blinded by Marcus's flare gun, he squeezed the trigger.
Dean immediately seized his opportunity to make a run for the driver side door, sparing Lawrence a token glance. Unluckiest bastard he'd ever met. Tearing open the door, he didn't bother closing it as he jumped in and eagerly turned the key that had been left in the ignition. The set up was clearly different than that of a regular car, but all he needed know was how to go. "Everyone hold on!" Hearing the engine roar, his foot sank into the gas pedal. For one terrifying moment, he could feel some of the wheels fighting to move against the ice that held them in place, but the powerful vehicle won out in the end, lurching forward and racing away to safety.
As sturdy as he was, Dennis Dumais couldn't bounce back like he used to. The shot tore through the girl's shoulder, but even if he'd hit his mark, he'd chosen the wrong target. The blonde young woman waved a hand towards him like one might swat away a fly before one large spike rose up in front of him, obscuring his view. A second spike jutted out from the existing one at an angle. Dennis's feet left the ground, but it was far from that feeling of weightlessness he'd experienced a moment ago. In fact, everything suddenly felt much heavier than usual.
His weapon hit the ground before he did as the spikes retracted. His eyelids felt the heaviest of all, but before everything faded to black, Dennis managed to glimpse the retreating bumper of the APC as his grandson sped away.
Pain, pain, and more pain finally drove the injured Aberration on the ground just mad enough that she couldn't care anymore.
Yellow light washed over the entire area for almost twenty meters around her, barely missing the car as it escaped. Everything in the field floated upwards save for her and she screamed into the concrete until her voice was hoarse.
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Several people tried to crawl out of the mess that spilled from inside the collector that Lily's group had left behind, but injuries compounded with the lack of room and air within the machine had left them too weak to move far. One blinked weakly after Kusari as the subnatural walked away, pulling two others with her after declaring the people nearby less worth the time than someone else.
Were he in a normal frame of mind, he would have thought the reaction appropriate. The world certainly hadn't been kind to subnaturals the last ten years and there were only the barest hints that social outlook was beginning to improve for them.
But he wasn't sitting cozy in his home at the moment. Nor was he calmly thinking through political conundrums behind his desk at city hall where an overturned plaque denoting his title as the town's mayor had, by now, been knocked into a corner during the initial rush to escape.
He only saw a subnatural caring for its own and in that delirious moment where the world's issues were too far out of mind, he could see that schism growing. It already had, by any estimation, but now it threatened to divide the world in two. The stopgap measures of the Institutes were the only sentinels against the growing dissatisfaction everyone could feel, but couldn't fix. The lines were being drawn and redrawn in the sand everywhere else and Mayor Tisdahl wasn't the only politician to realize what the inevitable outcome of it all could be.
Who started and propagated what wouldn't matter in a modern war against magic and by that point there would be little recourse for either side except total annihilation.
All the potential consequences seemed packaged neatly into the subnatural girl's receding back, and he hoped it was just a byproduct of the pain-addled thoughts that gave him such a bad feeling about it all.
As he wavered in and out of consciousness, his last waking thought was simply, They could have at least called for help.
Towards what remained of the initially sortied members of offensive support, Angel's attacks shattered the collector's legs, one missing its mark amd puncturing the metal near the collector's foot instead, but throwing it off balance enough that it tipped over anyway, crashing onto its side.
The large hatch near the front of its torso clattered open and deposited only an emulsion of clothing and human onto the street, the result of its body trying to rearrange its innards--humans included.
The stench was incredible and escaped the clockwork creature easily in the cold, evening air, blanketing the nearby mages with a nauseating wave of heat and human odors.
West of them, Ernie and Christmas were moving as quickly and carefully as possible towards Angel's location, the healer obediently tailing Ernie as they attempted to navigate around the worst of the crashing and thundering sounds near their location. They needed to reach Angel, but the shaking and thundering only seemed to follow them despite Ernie's attempts to put some distance between himself and the source of the noise.
Without warning, the collector's footsteps quickened and the sound of cement and glass shattering just a few buildings away was far too close for comfort.
If they had made any progress towards leaving the danger behind during the walk, it was rectified quickly when the machine turned down the street just ahead of them and twitched repeatedly, slamming the side of its body against a nearby wall before stumbling straight at the pair. Whatever remained of its original purpose seemed to flicker in and out of the spastically winking lights of its eyes, and the clockwork barreled at the two of them once it finally registered two living things in its path.
