Technique - suiting up

It happened in history class.  A faint pressure-wave that felt like my face was being tugged at before every window and piece of glass in the room exploded.  Three seats away from the wall, I only caught a light dusting of fragments.  The kids right next to the windows were screaming.  Some were bleeding.  The teacher had fallen, and standing up I saw him on the ground with blood pooling around his head.  He was old and old-fashioned.  Glass lenses in his glasses, not plastic.  I took it all in without really understanding what was happening, until a beeping on my waist made me reach for my PDA.

AUTO-SCAN//WARNING//FREQUENCY//MATCH
SHATTERBIRD - 99%
ACTIVATE EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS? Y/N

It's too soon.

The world came into focus.  I realized people screaming as my mind caught up.  A shaking finger hit 'yes' and I started running.  The first thing I did was reach up to my collar and tear away the safety patch, making my coat unfurl, split, and writhe in the air in response to my emotions.  A bit of Cranial's tech, CNT-based synthetic muscle fibers based around a control system developed from scans of Parian's powers.  I never left home without it, weapon and armor in one.  I'd call it my best creation.

Utterly useless for helping the people I ran past.  Most were scared and confused.  A few looked like they understood what had just happened, frozen in terror.  I pushed my way past those that reached out for me.

It's too soon.

More beeping.  As I burst through the outside doors, half-expecting the entire roster of the Nine waiting outside, green circles filled and pinged 'ready.'  Three combat drones, outfitted with the kind of armaments that that would get me far more than a simple 'talking to' from the PRT if they knew I had them.  Most of what I could scrounge up going into these, my best and most lethal designs for the worst-case scenario.  I launched them without hesitation as I made my way to my dormroom.

ETA - 20 MINUTES.

The nature and structure of the Siberian's power was unknown to me.  Crawler was too durable from adapting to everything that had been thrown at him over the years.  I couldn't delude myself, I couldn't do anything but run from them.  The others?  Maybe.  I'd traded for stolen snippets of Dragon's AI coding from Toybox and expanded it.  My drones' weaponry could crack open a tank.  They could protect me.  If they got here in time.

In my room, I reached under my bed and pulled out a sealed case.  Yes, Armsmaster, I want to know how to Shatterbird-proof all my tech.  No Armsmaster, I'm not being paranoid.  The Slaughterhouse Nine is a danger to everyone, especially with Mannequin gunning for Tinkers.  Not taking measures against a power that could cripple a tinker's defenses would just be dumb, and YES I AM VERY SMART.

The Boron-crystalline composite that formed the blade had been too difficult to set in a curve.  I was left with a narrow triangle, more nail than sword, and enough E in the EMP to hopefully punch through and disrupt the systems of whatever Mannequin used for armor, or kill anything short of the higher-end brutes.  Not that I'd had the time to learn how to use a sword.  Perhaps someone else could make better use of it.  I put on the bracers, hardlight blade generators based on the scans of the many clawed parahumans here with me.  Simple antigrav anklets for added mobility were next.  All of them stopgaps, emergency measures, designed to keep me alive while drones did the real work.  I had no desire to get close to a killer who'd already defeated many better trained and equipped tinkers than I.

My PDA gave off a shrill proximity alarm.  Tiny drones scattered around the campus, burrowed into the Earth, had poked feelers into the air.  Small, shielded, quietly linked by a buried web of fiber optic cabling.  Facial recognition programs I'd improved were loaded into the central hub, and they all reached the same conclusion.

MANNEQUIN - 99% match
UNKNOWN//S9 - ??

At least two of them.

It's too soon.

I ran from the dorms, into the open, into danger, towards a bunch of untested, powered teenagers with issues.  A few armed drones crawled out from under the shrubbery and leapt onto me, climbing into my waiting arms.  More options.  Pyrotechnical did good work.

At least in this place, I won't be fighting alone.