Needle Breaker

Syringes emerged from the floor like a cresting wave, growing larger and more numerous as they got further from the source.  I watched as Withdrawal tried to escape the tide, and an extension of the needles cut him off.  Tinker stilts and the repelling shield he’d stolen off of a guard caused the needles to break, spilling dirty yellow-black fluid onto the floor.

Pumps, thick pipes, and white tile defined this corner of the complex’s second floor.  We’d fanned out, our groups moving through the various rooms with the intent of clearing each room in turn and ensuring we wouldn’t be flanked, using powers to ensure we wouldn’t be followed.  Anything else ensured a constant fight from all corners.

Except we’d hit a snare.  The idea had been that if we had any fights, any victories would mean we could fold in on and flank the enemies to either side of us.  And as far as I could tell, none of our teams were winning their fights or moving on to the step two.

Needles grew out in clumps, clusters, and bouquets, and then more needles and clumps grew out of the clumps.

“Don’t get pricked!” some kid shouted.  One of our Mortari capes.  “My analysis says they’re drugged and diseased!”

Withdrawal yelped as he avoided a sudden emergence of syringes.  I crashed into the needles with the Wretch, shielding my face with my arms.  Withdrawal already had his mask, so he didn’t need to worry about the spray.

“Help,” Caryatid said, voice quiet.  The needles had cut her off while she wasn’t moving, and now grew in thicker, until they came at her from every direction, all stopping millimeters away from her face, neck, arms, chest, belly, and thighs.  She had gone human to talk, her back straight, arms at her sides, wearing the long, slim black dress with the yellow-orange poofs at the wrists and feet.  She resumed her breaker form, the poofs and her head becoming something more fractal.

For the time being, I couldn’t do a lot.  The broken glass and shattered plastic of syringes pressed in even though I’d broken them, edges reaching for me.  I backed off, hemmed in.

The geography of this particular stretch of hallways was a H turned ninety degrees, and I was in the lower intersection, Caryatid to my right.  Withdrawal was up ahead and around the corner to the left, periodically visible through the thicker pipes.

“Terminal, incurable, long term diseases,” our unhelpful helper volunteered.  “Addictive substances!”

“Got it!  Go help someone else, or get somewhere safe!”

*

Withdrawal, skinny, wearing a skintight suit, a mask, and the limb-extending agility frame, had only the shields he’d kept for defense, the syringe he carried for offense.  But the shields required energy and the syringe made a shitty club, especially when needles erupted from the wall to hem in how much he could swing the syringe at the stuff in his way.

I could bust up the syringes, but I couldn’t bust up the syringes and then tackle the areas with more syringes.  Our attacker was staying out of sight now, but I’d glimpsed her a minute ago.  Tall, possibly breaker class, a slim, ghostly silhouette similar to Caryatid’s, with red eyes, a surgical mask over the lower face, a white covering from the neck down, so tight at the legs that it looked like she couldn’t walk, and feet impaled by the bristling syringes, points sticking out and through bare flesh.  When she’d moved, it had been on that moving ‘cushion’, syringes appearing and disappearing to stab her feet and back repeatedly while buoying her away at a runner’s speed, her body twisting and arching with each set of impacts.

Breaker class, but shaker in practice.  With a sweep of her arm, she caused syringes to spring out from the ground, walls, and ceiling like a crashing wave.  All loaded to bear, apparently, with stuff that would guarantee we died a few months or years from now.

She moved away like she considered us dealt with, and in reality, I wasn’t positive we weren’t.  Crashing through the syringes with the Wretch would disable the Wretch and impale the Victoria.  Caryatid couldn’t move without losing her invulnerability.  Withdrawal had a great deal of movement and a lot of gaps in his defenses, which were a bad combination in this environment, where moving in the wrong way would get us pricked.

*

I’d thrown myself into this side of the fight to help the C-team and now I was in over my head.  I hit a cluster of syringes, clearing some of the way, putting myself in the midst of them while waiting for the Wretch to return.  Then I let it do its thing.  Reaching out, clawing, destroying.  A swathe of destruction around me.

Putting the Wretch aside for a moment, I grabbed a fire extinguisher that was mounted on a wall, and I swung it full-bodied in Caryatid’s direction.  It arced through the air, and it crashed through the syringes, giving her some ability to move.  When she did move, it was in sharp, careful movements that cleared more of her way.

Even with the cacophony of noise nearby, I didn’t miss the small, frantic sound from her while she was human and not in her breaker form, reaching down for the fire extinguisher, then using it as a bludgeon.

“Cary!” Withdrawal called out.  “Stay calm!  It can’t hurt you unless you let it!”

The Wretch swiped, tore, and crushed the syringes in my way.  The ground was a carpet of broken glass, broken plastic, needles, and fluids in noxious colors.

“I can’t do this,” she said.  “I can’t stand this.  I have bad dreams that aren’t as bad as this.”

“Stay calm!” Withdrawal grunted out the words, between swings of his tinker weapon.  It wasn’t meant for the task, and it was taking a beating.  Big as it was, not every swing broke everything it hit.

*

She was about to say something, but another tide of syringes came our way from around the corner, in Withdrawal’s general direction.  A second later, a shape hurtled in that same direction.  Hurtled and stopped.

Precipice, now suspended in the air above a carpet of needles, using his power.

“Uh,” he said.

“Caryatid!  The extinguisher!”  I reached out my arms.

She went breaker and used the short lunge of her movement to toss the extinguisher at me.  It took me both arms to catch.

“Incoming!” Precipice called out.  He created a blade.

I used my strength to hurl the extinguisher, changing what I was aiming for in the last moment before release.  It crashed through the thicket of needles between me and Precipice, hit the ground, and crashed through stuff there, not directly beneath him.

*

But it gave Withdrawal a spot to jump forward to, landing in a bare patch with just a bit of skid on the fluids and broken material that now carpeted the ground there.  He caught Precipice, then sprung back the way he’d come.

*

Down the other hallway, the needle breaker was fighting Love Lost, Chastity, Roman, and Colt.  Fume Hood had apparently gone off to do something else.

Love Lost pounced, driving clawed fingertips and toe-tips into her chest, the breaker tried to retaliate by bringing syringe-fingers toward Love Lost’s middle.  Love Lost sprung back, landing on hands and feet.  Colt was hacking at the syringes around them, cutting at them with her black blade, while deftly dodging whatever came near.

But they were maneuverability, not durability.  Same issue as Withdrawal.  As the syringe breaker got more into it, there was less room to maneuver.

She was hurt at least.

She backed away, pulling to one side-

And Imp stuck her with the scepter she held.

The woman dropped, falling backward.

Ten feet from me, in the thickest outcropping of syringes, I saw her emerge, pushing through.  Skin and skintight dress were impaled in a hundred places by the glass and syringes, pulling hard enough against it that needle points were bent to nearly right angles, bands of flesh pulled away from arm, face, neck, and sides because the flesh had been penetrated enough times to be looser and the needles were trying to pull straight again.  Some points raked her.

The damage healed, except where she remained impaled.  She hung off the wall, suspended.  Body weight pulled her free as much as anything else.  A cushion of needles waited beneath her feet, as she prepared to drop down to it.

The others couldn’t get to her, but she was close enough for me to deal with.  I took flight, still dragging the guy with the broken leg behind me-

*

Colt slashed through the thicket keeping the other group from accessing the breaker.  Love Lost jumped through the first gap that was visible, and tackled the breaker, who was only now getting shakily to her feet.

Claws impaled the woman by the shoulders.  Love Lost brought her masked face close, then swiped her arms out to the sides.  The claws didn’t break contact with the woman’s arms, as Love Lost raked her bone-deep from each shoulder to the respective hand.

A kick with clawed toes to the chest separated the two, knocking the breaker to the ground.

“What the fuck, Love Lost?” I asked.