The Butcher's BIll: 2.1

Everyone except for me was crowded around a table pushed against one wall. After some experimentation, I had managed to use Flint's powers to create a cutaway model of the Teeth's hideout; inside it, I was controlling my bugs to mimic the positions of each of the Teeth. Ligeia - Kyesha - had helpfully given me a few bottles of nail polish to make the bugs stand out more, but the size of the bugs and the model meant that the Ambassadors had to cram in shoulder-to-shoulder with the Undersiders in order to get a good look.

A year ago I would have been petrified of giving orders to a group of people like this. Now, I was mostly just irritated that Imp was whispering to Regent instead of paying attention. "Okay. Right now the Teeth are busy licking their wounds, so we have an opportunity to hit them while they're still recovering. Our priority targets are the remaining powered members of the Teeth - Reaver, Vex, Cadmus, Snowblind, Wicker Man, and Bonnet. Of those, the ones to take out first are probably Cadmus and Vex. Cadmus can send his summoned snakes under most of Vex's razor fields, and if Vex and Snowblind can get both of their Shaker powers onto the same area, we'll be dealing with razor fields that we can't see. Othello? Imp? You two are going to be sneaking in ahead of the rest of us and tazing Cadmus and Vex before they can get their powers off." Diving into the Butchers' memories to develop profiles on her teammates' powers hadn't been fun - it felt a little bit like watching a snuff film, and gave me the uncontrollable urge to bathe when I was done - but it had been useful.

[...]

I turned back to the model. "The main challenge with the other four will be keeping them from just cutting and running. Reaver's Mover powers make him hard to pin down, Snowblind's blizzards slow you down and are hard to see through, Wicker Man is tough to stop without a lot of firepower, and Bonnet has that pepper spray power that makes her a pain in the ass at close range." I looked at the group, then back at the model of the building. "I can take any one of them, really, or even all four together, but there are enough unpowered soldiers in the building that I might not be able to get through all of them before one of the powered Teeth gets away. Regent, Ligeia, that means you're on doorway duty. Anyone who tries to leave the building? Trip them up, spray them, knock them down. Lizardtail, you're with them. Keep them safe, and try to keep any of the Teeth from dying unnecessarily."

[...]

Through the window in the downstairs door, I could see the front of the Teeth's hideout, a nondescript apartment complex which was occupied almost exclusively by members of their gang. It was a little bit too far for me to be able to pick out circulatory systems through the wall, but I could see the interior of the building quite easily through the eyes of my bugs. Apparently, that was enough for Devil Child's teleportation power, because I started feeling the slight pull of a gravitational imbalance, as though I were simultaneously standing on flat ground and on the deck of a tilted ship. I focused the teleport on what looked like a lounge area, maybe a rec room; Reaver was in there watching television, and I wanted to take him by surprise before he could get himself up to speed.

[...]

"Othello? Is your doppleganger in position? I'm running out of places to set up deadfalls and tripwires covertly. Pretty soon I'm going to have to start being a little bit more obvious with what my bugs are doing, so things could get heated more or less any second." Frankly, I could see why previous Butchers had rarely used their Tinker power. When you're nearly invulnerable and are strong enough to carry around and effectively aim anti-tank weaponry, the ability to set up exceptionally clever snares and tripwires is almost superfluous. With my ability to stealthily manipulate spider silk with my bugs, though, it was downright useful. I had done simple things like tie my opponents to objects before - now I knew that if I set up a fulcrum there and a counterweight there I could use one victim's body weight to send a cord whipping across a room at neck height and hopefully back people into another tripwire there...

Othello nodded, so I started being less subtle. Bugs crawled into shoes, into holsters, jamming themselves suicidally down the barrels of guns and absconding with peoples' phones when their backs were turned. Part of me, and I think I knew which part, honestly wanted to just skip straight to the action and start busting heads, but I suppressed the impulse. I'd survived this long as Skitter by being careful and methodical and by setting the stage for my actions ahead of time whenever possible, and I wasn't going to throw that out just because I had an excuse to act like Alexandria and beat up a room full of thugs while ignoring their retaliations like I had wanted to do since I was eight.

Sure enough, someone saw my bugs moving around and screamed. I turned to the group, said "Go!", and then I let my internal sense of balance finally shift. Teleporting felt a little bit like falling down a well. There was a brief moment of weightlessness, a sense of motion-but-not-motion, and then a whumph of flame as the kinetic energy of my 'landing' was transmuted into heat. I winced a little bit as the puff of flame roasted most of the bugs that I had been using to survey the area. It was a potential liability in the way that my powers interacted that I had yet to find a perfect remedy for. Still, I had been planning for it - that was why most of the bugs that I had sent to this room had been hardy, replaceable species like cockroaches, and why it was that even as I swung my makeshift club at the back of Reaver's head, all of my bees and wasps went to the other rooms in the building.