Khepri E

I needed a focus, a weak point I could capitalize on.  To those ends, I needed to buy time to work and I needed to bait him into getting angry.

Between them, Labyrinth and Scrub began making paths to other worlds.  I watched as they paged through the available options.

Scion emerged from the other world, having broken down the barrier we’d set.  Fragments of Alexandria’s body tumbled to the ground, more like a statue than flesh.  He had to flex his hand and use his power to free it of the left side of her skull.

He’d suffered for a few of the big hits we’d delivered.  His flesh remained pristine, golden, but there were folds and scraps here and there where his damaged flesh had been stripped away and remained in place around the creases of his body after the replacement flesh had come in.

He came out swinging, obliterating two continents on two different worlds before he found us.

One rotation of Sifara’s ball, a row of doorways, and the capes were pulled backwards through the portals, which closed promptly after them.

The debris hadn’t even settled when I had Sifara move the ball again, erecting more portals to send my capes into the battlefield.  Brute force, capes who could tie him down, capes who could take a hit or two.  I kept Lung in the fight, holding him back for later, when he’d be exponentially stronger.

As strategies went, it would hold for at least a little while.  Scion’s patience seemed to be getting shorter and shorter, and I was on guard for the next retaliatory strike.

My heart was pounding, my mouth dry.  This was looking grim, each exchange hurting my side more than it hurt Scion.  Was there an out?  A chink in the armor?

I’d collected all of the tinkers in one place and I’d put them on autopilot, a vague, nebulous goal in mind.  To get them working together, I’d used Zero of the Yàngbǎn to tie them together as a group, splitting their powers.

A few hundred tinkers, each with a mix of tinker powers, all working on a singular project.

I could sense it, using the Clairvoyant and Doormaker both, using Labyrinth and Scrub.  The solid space between worlds.  A space that Scion had altered somehow, blocking off.

Facing off against that, I’d had them build something roughly the size of a house.  There was a gun build into the construction, but it was snub nosed, stocky and unimpressive.

I gave Defiant the honor of pulling the switch.

The machine whirred to life.

Through the Clairvoyant, through Labyrinth and Doormaker, I could sense the machine reaching through every available world.

> >

I ran anyways, turning my attention to the tinker’s machine.

The gibberish text on the screen had turned red.  Failure.  The combined strength of all of the tinkers who remained, Bonesaw excepted, and it had failed.  There was no way to get to the space Scion had sealed off, no way to his ‘well’, where he drew all of his resources from.

Speck 30.5