The beginning of the fight was somewhat of an awkward, chaotic mess that really wasn’t helped by the fact that there wasn’t a clear divide between heroes and villains.

  I could see a few of the Protectorate heroes throwing uncertain glances at Crystal and her family even as they moved to cover the remaining civilians without exposing their backs to the Undersiders, which didn’t seem to sit well with any of New Wave.

  I didn’t have that issue. It was fairly obvious who my first opponent was going to be.

  Pretty much at the same moment a fight became inevitable, Armsmaster pointed his weapon at me and the tip unfolded just enough that I caught the hint of what looked like a gun barrel and the sound of pressurised gas escaping. On instinct, my left hand snapped up over my chest just in time to deflect some sort of dart from hitting me.

  Some kind of tranquilizer, no doubt.

  Armsmaster hadn’t been just relying on that surprise attack to take me down, though, and was already moving to get closer into melee range.

  Well, if he wanted to dance…

  [Boost!]

  I took advantage of my suddenly increased speed to sidestep Armsmaster’s halberd and quickly threw a punch at his side. Just like him, I wasn’t in the mood for a long, drawn out fight. So either knocking him out or damaging his armor enough so it locked up on him were both fine by me.

  I wasn’t that lucky though.

  Even though it should have been almost impossible for him to react to me suddenly moving as fast as I did, Armsmaster managed to stop his own attack before he overcommitted and pivoted out of the way almost perfectly.

  I slapped his counterattack aside with my gauntlet, but it turned out that dodge wasn’t a one time thing.

  Every attack and counterattack I attempted was either dodged or deflected with mechanical precision from the Protectorate leader. And at the same time his own attacks were timed to either take advantage of a gap in my own movements or to give him space so I couldn’t simply grapple him and end the fight that way.

  He was a lot better of a fighter than I would have expected, but I suppose it made sense if he was used to going up against Lung from time to time.

  We quickly fell into a sort of back and forth exchange of attacks with me on the definite losing end. Even when I stacked on another Boost I was having trouble more than scuffing his armor before he dodged, while I was accumulating cuts and scrapes that had left my dress little more than some fancy rags.

  It didn’t help that the other groups had gotten over their feelings of hesitation and now the gala floor had turned into a near four way free-for-all between the other capes and I had to keep an eye out for stray or sneak attacks. Thankfully, Grue ended up covering a good bit of the room with the gaseous darkness he could emit and essentially acted like a giant smoke grenade which meant I didn’t need to keep looking that way for intentional attacks, but it did mean I had no idea what the Wards and more than half of New Wave were doing.

  Amy was the only one that I could see at the moment, and she was busy throwing blasts of demonic energy at Velocity, who looked more interested in trying to talk her down than actually fighting.

  That was all I had time to see, because Skitter chose that moment to impose on my and Armsmaster's fight in the form of a cloud of stinging insects.

  And fucking hells, I was instantly not a fan of the experience.

  It didn’t matter that the bugs’ jaws and stingers couldn’t pierce my skin thanks to my increased toughness, because Skitter could still make me flinch by having them ram into my eyes or try crawling into my nose or ears no matter how often I brushed them away or moved to avoid them.

  More than once I almost ended up taking a big hit from Armsmaster as a result, but at the same time he became a lot easier to target too? Skitter wasn’t even attacking him so what–

  “Stupid girl, you’re throwing off the modeling data.” Armsmaster snarled, and I immediately knew what was happening.

  I knew he had some sort of combat prediction program installed on his suit, but I had assumed it wouldn’t be a factor because there wasn’t a whole lot of footage of me fighting to actually build a model of how I fight.

  Tinkertech was apparently a bit more bullshit than I gave it credit for, but not so much that his model could adjust for ‘the target keeps getting hit in the eye by FUCKING FLIES’!

  Skitter was rapidly burning through my sympathy for her, and while I realised Coil was likely behind the Undersiders being here at the moment and they were likely being treated as a semi-disposable distraction… I was also starting to not care.

  Especially not when something decided to buzz directly in my ear and almost made me flinch into a stab made by Armsmaster, who had extended another needle type device at the base of his halberd. This time I managed to grab the base of the weapon before it could hit me and squeeze hard enough that the bottom four inches of his weapon were now a mangled wreck even as I lost sight of him because of several insects suddenly covering my eyes and had to let go thanks to the hero shoulder checking me by surprise.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  What was worse, was the fact that pulling back and scrubbing my face with a free hand didn’t actually provide any relief either. The moment I cleared the bugs attacking my face, more immediately replaced them.

  I also couldn’t afford to let things drag out much longer either. Not when I had to potentially deal with both the Empire and the Travelers after this. Using any abilities that drained too much stamina were also off the table, so no Explosion or Balance Breaker.

  Even if I really would have liked to break out my Scale Mail because someone kept going for my FUCKING EYES!

  Another flying insect kamikaze’d into my face and I felt a slight burn as whatever it had been dunked in started to make my eye water. Skitter had apparently decided distracting me wasn’t enough and was augmenting her army of bugs with anything she could find to hinder me more.

  That was it. Armsmaster could wait.

  I was going to deal with Skitter, grab Amy and maybe the New Wave kids, and then teleport out of here the moment I could force the spell.

  But first I needed to get rid of the pests already buzzing on and around me.

  A spell circle bloomed underneath me with another appearing overhead. I could hear Armsmaster yelling at his teammates to get away as I pushed the two circles to be as large as possible without catching any of my allies inside them.

  I was going to be scaling down the power for this spell a lot but that didn’t mean it would be pleasant for anyone inside its range.

  A snap of my fingers caused a crackle of electricity to spark around my hand. That was all the warning I gave before a small electrical storm began to rage inside my two circles.

  “Hrrk!!”

  Unfortunately, downscaling the power but keeping it high enough to kill all the bugs in the area still meant that it felt like I’d been hit by a full body taser. Even if it didn’t exactly hurt, every muscle in my body locked up from the electricity running through it.

  I didn’t need to run it long though. The whole electric storm might have been improvised but even with me holding back to not fry myself too badly, it was way more powerful than a bug zapper. Everything besides me inside of it was dead in a handful of seconds.

  With Armsmaster temporarily driven off and the swarm annihilated, I got my first chance to actually fully observe the other side of the fight that had previously been blocked by Grue’s smoke.

  Shielder was pretty much sidelined as he was focusing on protecting the remaining civilians from the rest of the chaos unfolding over there behind a glowing blue wall. Though if anything, his presence probably only encouraged the others to be less careful as they fought. There were several ruined tables piled in front of his shield that could only have come from Glory Girl throwing them around. No one else was strong enough.

  And I was sure those were only the most visible examples.

  To my shock, Laserdream was actually out of the fight. I couldn’t tell exactly how it happened but she was mostly covered in slowly expanding containment foam and bleeding from a cut on her face. I’d bet money it had something to do with something the Wards did, because Gallant was sporting a rather large dent in the middle of his breastplate and a visibly enraged Glory Girl was being kept from moving from her current position by Vista.

  Not that things were going perfectly for the villains either.

  Regent was down on the ground holding his stomach with Miss Militia standing over him with her power taking the form of an automatic shotgun pointed at Grue’s darkness. The fact the slender boy wasn’t bleeding out on the floor meant she had probably used some form of less-than-lethal ammunition, but he obviously hadn’t enjoyed it.

  The immediate problem was that despite all that, Skitter was nowhere in sight and I doubted she had just given up fighting because I’d dealt with a large part of her swarm. Not when she had fought Lung with less.

  I needed to—

  My thoughts were interrupted as two of Bitch’s monstrous dogs exploded out of Grue’s darkness and directly charged me. I caught the first one by the jaws and dragged it into the path of the second, but wrestling two animals the size of a car was awkward even if I was strong enough to throw them around.

  I threw the one I’d caught halfway across the room only for the second to pounce and then had to repeat the whole thing when the first circled back. Even slamming them into the floor didn’t really stop them, it only made the other angrier as they tried to bite me.

  “Call them off, Bitch!” I yelled out, hoping the other girl could hear me. “Your dogs aren’t going to do much more than get in my way and I’d rather not hurt them if I can help it!” Instead of an answer, though, all I heard over the sounds of fighting all around me was a single piercing whistle and a moment later the third dog – which must have come out of the smoke while I was distracted by the other two – bit down on my torso from behind. And thanks to the size of the damned thing, that meant over half my body was suddenly inside the beast’s mouth with teeth the size of my hand trying to bite through me.

  Fuck it, I warned her. Besides, I vaguely remembered Bitch’s dogs had their real bodies moved when they were transformed.

  There was a wet crunch as I punched the dog’s mouth from the inside. The mutated dog yelped in pain and shook its head vigorously to get me away even through a shattered jaw. I felt a little bad about it, but that was offset from the unpleasant wetness I could feel everywhere else.

  “Fucker!”

  And Bitch was definitely angry at me. Especially if she rushed out of where she was hiding just to curse at me.

  “Bitch, no! Don’t!”

  And there was Tattletale, trying to wrangle her troublesome teammate. Skitter also tried to block me from getting to her teammate by forming a thin cloud of insects between us – which was probably the most she could manage on short notice after I bug zapped the rest of her swarm.

  They needn’t have bothered though. Because right behind Tattletale was Skitter’s actual body, and my real target.

  Something Tattletale picked up pretty quickly, going by how fast she turned to the other cape.

  But—

  [Boost!]

  — I wasn't interested in playing with my opponents at the moment.

  In the blink of an eye, I had Tattletale by her throat and Skitter pinned to the floor under my foot. And just to make sure neither of them could pull anything, the same two spell circles for my improvised bug zapper spell bloomed around us.

  “I don’t really have time right now, so don’t try anything and I’ll do my best to ignore your part in this clusterfuck.” I told the two of them. “I just want to know one thing, how did Coil expect to get through my defenses and kidnap Dinah?”

  Skitter started squirming to escape until I pressed down lightly but with the same inevitability as an industrial press until she stopped and went perfectly still.

  I doubted she had actually given up, but as long as it delayed things until I figured out where I needed to go, I would take it.

  “Lucifer, stand down and surrender!”

  I turned slightly to face Armsmaster and Miss Militia, who had joined up to confront me. And a quick glance was enough to confirm they were really the only ones in a position to.

  Triumph was off in the back still weakly choking on whatever bug Skitter had shoved down his throat and proving the girl hadn’t given up as much as she appreciated to be. Velocity had at some point been defeated by Amy. But at the same time, Bitch was now on the ground the same as Regent had been.

  Which meant unless Shielder joined in or Vista stopped trying to contain Glory Girl, the only capes still in this fight were the two Protectorate capes, me, Amy, and Grue. And I doubted the Undersider cape was all that eager to seriously join in a fight he was clearly outmatched in.

  “I thought I told you that was never going to happen, Armsmaster.” I said, trying to sound unbothered despite the growing awareness that I was now basically standing in the middle of the room in nothing but my underwear and a few scraps that used to be my dress.

  And while I was pretty sure the news channels wouldn’t show me in my current state, I had a feeling the internet wouldn’t be so kind.

  “So, Tattletale, your answer?” I turned my attention back to the blonde in my grip, letting up on the pressure enough that she could speak.

  “...Didn’t have to… Travelers… Trickster…” She gasped.

  Didn’t have to? Because of Trickst– the wards around the manor only stopped people with hostile intentions towards me or the people inside from getting close or incoming attacks. I never managed to set up a more secure ward preventing teleportation and hadn’t looked into it because of how rare teleportation was as a power.

  There was nothing really stopping someone from teleporting Dinah out of the house if they wanted, especially if they didn’t need to be in the house in the first place!

  Just as I processed that revelation, I found myself suddenly holding a shocked looking Amy and a moment later Skitter had been replaced by a mannequin.