Pins Coil

And he started towards the car he’d stashed here to finish his clean getaway.

“And where do you think you’re going?”

Coil A spun around —

“Gurk!”

— and something scythed through his gut like fire, lifted him up off of his feet, carried him backwards, and slammed him like a missile into one of the concrete support beams. His head cracked off of it, and as a new pain bloomed across the back of his skull, for a few timeless seconds, he saw stars.

“Gu-huh!”

He gasped in a breath, tried to focus, but his lungs had trouble filling and the flames burning his belly made concentrating all but impossible. Uncountable moments passed, stretching out into infinity such that there was no way to separate seconds from minutes from hours, but eventually, somehow, he managed to claw his way back to coherence.

When he looked down to see what had hit him, however —

“No. No, no, no!”

— it was to find an enormous greatsword jutting out from under his diaphragm, the hilt offered out in some ludicrous mockery of the Sword in the Stone.

He was already reaching for it before he could even consider whether or not he should.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

Coil A looked up to find a face carved from stone step out of the dark.

“Right now, the thing that’s killing you is also the only thing keeping you alive.”

He blinked, realized, yes, if he were somehow able to remove the sword in his belly, he’d bleed out in under a minute, and began to observe the person across from him (the owner of the sword, some part of him knew distantly). A lean, narrow face, framed by long locks of silver. Silvery steel armor, a black bodysuit trimmed in muted red, a luminescent green pattern on the chest — there was no cape in Brockton Bay who met that description.

Wait. No, there was. Recorded only once, locked away in one of the secret files that Piggot would never have thought he had access to, a cape that had met Armsmaster on her first night out after she had beaten Lung single-handedly. A cape who had transformed from this knightly figure into a teenage girl in purple and gold.