A costumed Flyboy came crashing down out of the sky twenty feet to my left, hitting the earth like a missile of blood and bone. Above me, the sky crackled with lightning and thunder as Tempest brought the storm’s fury to bear on the Morning Star. The traitorous Cape was on the defensive—building shields of solid light as he was tossed about by hurricane strength winds and sheets of rain—but that was the only good news I saw. Over half the original Capes were missing, and the handful who remained with Tempest were being overwhelmed as additional Black Hats took to the sky.
On the ground, the situation was somehow even worse. The staccato crackle of gunfire mixed with the crash of thunder, but the First Battalion’s lines had broken, and what had once been a strong, if hastily assembled, perimeter had fractured into chaos. Pyros, Lightbringers and Telekinetics rained down death on each other from a distance as Titans, Stalwarts and Jitterbugs waded through the sea of soldiers and civilians like earthbound Gods.
I sucked air into my one working lung, spat out blood from the other, and lay there, useless and injured, as people died around me.
Maybe Nikolai had been right all along. Maybe if I’d taken Amos’ advice and worked toward an academic scholarship, I wouldn’t have ended up in the desert, bleeding out while multiple teams of Capes fought and died. Hell, maybe I even deserved to have it end like this.
But you know what?
Fuck going out on my back.
Fuck going out easy.
Never lived easy. Wasn’t going to die that way either. Not even if the world ended around me.
I rolled to one side and slowly, painfully, pushed myself back to my feet.
•—•—•
There wasn’t any part of the White Knight that remained recognizable, just a hunk of meat and bone, discarded in Carnage’s wake. I was staggering past the corpse, too worried that stopping would make it impossible to start again, when something caught my eye.
The hilt and broken blade of the Knight’s sword.
I shouldn’t have been able to bend down to grab it, but I did anyway, scooping it out of the dirt without slowing. More pain, but it blended in with the rest, still distant if no longer possible to ignore.
I passed Maul’s body next and then, not much further on, found Tremor. The Black Hat was on his back, eyes wide open, with a strangely neat bullet hole through his forehead, and what remained of his brains spread across the desert beneath him.
Score one for the men and women of the First Battalion.
As I reached the ridge, I found Carnage and Jaws in a field of broken bodies. The Shifter was limping badly, his natural regeneration overwhelmed by the sheer number of injuries he’d suffered. Carnage was covered in gore, but otherwise untouched. As I watched, he scooped up a dead Cape with one enormous hand and threw her twenty feet through the air into a cluster of soldiers.
At the center of the space they’d cleared, Fallout was at work. The Black Hat was turned to the sky, his long hair streaming out behind him. Spindly fingers wove invisible patterns in the air, and high above us, shadows stretched from the clouds to grasp one of the last few soaring Capes. The unknown Wind Dancer faltered, his mouth opening in a silent scream, and shadows poured in through that mouth, through his eyes, his nose and his ears.
Moments later, the Cape’s wind deserted him, and he dropped from the sky like a stone.
A fresh storm of bullets came down from the far side of the ridge, where soldiers had formed a knot of resistance around a handful of Capes and the wreckage of another shuttle. Jaws staggered yet again, then he and Carnage turned to crush the opposition. For a moment, there was nobody looking in my direction.
I staggered through the bodies toward Fallout.
I wasn’t quiet. There’s no such thing as being quiet with a punctured lung and four barely functional limbs. But with Tempest’s storm raging around us, with soldiers screaming and dying, and Capes and Black Hats sounding their battle cries, the sounds of my passage almost went unnoticed.
Almost.
I was three feet from Fallout, creeping up behind him, when the cry went out.
“Fallout! Look out!”
Somehow, I’d missed Jaws’ wife in the sea of corpses.
I didn’t have time to kick myself for making the same mistake twice in a row. I didn’t have time to even think. Instead, I lunged forward, the White Knight’s broken blade fully extended in front of me.
Fallout’s own shadow reached up and stopped me cold, one tendril wrapped around my outstretched wrist like a steel manacle, even as another twined itself around my feet. The Shadecaster didn’t bother to turn in my direction. His sight was fixed on Tempest, long fingers momentarily paused, as if he was waiting for something.
High above us, the Weather Witch brought her arms together. The hurricane winds Lucian had been fighting suddenly reversed, and the Morning Star soared forward.
Right into a storm of lightning the likes of which I’d never seen before.
Struck hundreds of times in less than a second, the Lightbringer plummeted from the sky like a fiery comet.
Tempest paused to watch him fall.
Fallout’s fingers began to dance.
I’d been straining to reach the Black Hat from the moment he caught me, but his shadowy grip was as strong as any Titan’s. I watched darkness gather around his spindly fingers, seconds from lashing out with lethal force.
I thought of the low-level Shadecaster that Red had inadvertently killed down in the Hole.
And then I reached up with the bloody mess that was my free hand. I tore the metal shard out of my chest, and I stabbed down into the shadow that held me.
For just a moment, Fallout staggered, and the grip around my wrist and feet loosened. I took that final, all-important step, and
