Blackvein gazed at the field through the visor gifted to him by VeryHuman, though he was really looking through Quark. Positions, numbers, and threat descriptions populated in his vision.

  The gate was 500 meters tall on the sides, 500 meters wide, and with an arch that joined the two frames of gate that rose another 100 meters into the air. Down below, in the exact center of the space, was a mirrored gate that was about 5 meters by 5 meters square. The real gate house, the one that controlled how the gate worked or not, was below that central gate. All of the tech and magic that controlled the gate was down there, in a room that was maybe 10 meters cubed.

  The whole gate was on a northern/southern entrance/exit sort of axis.

  A few hundred meters north of that gate was a low gate barracks and scanning structure, which was the operative center of the space. It was there that the soldiers and the scanners and the various other tech existed. That was where they investigated what left or entered the gate. Gate control hadn’t been built yet, but eventually there would be towers on the western and eastern sides of the gate that directed air traffic flows.

  The scanning building was maybe 50% done. Most of the scanning supplies weren’t there yet.

  That building held the only real defense of the place, though.

  Taking that operations center was the goal.

  The team was ‘hidden’ from that operative center by a snow drift that had been turned to ice ‘days ago’, but which had really been placed here for just this positioning.

  Mark had expected this specific area to be trapped with something, thanks to Tartu, or whoever, but it was not trapped at all. Quark tentatively confirmed that, and Eliot confirmed it for real.

  VeryHuman tapped away at an invisible keyboard as he looked up and around, his eyes far, far away from here, as he said, “Expected forces at the gate. I’m counting pop-up turrets all around the zone at the locations I am marking on your visors now, in a concentric ring pattern up to 200 meters away from the gate itself. Three rings between here and the barracks station. A minimum of 20 turrets firing at us. I’m expecting gun-barrel turrets and rates of fire in the hundreds of rounds per second range. The gate is not fully operational, so of course it isn’t fully defended. We should only need to destroy these 8 I’m marking out. Try not to destroy most of them. I will take over the ones we don’t destroy.”

  Everyone was wearing VeryHuman’s visors, and so they all saw what he showed them.

  Blackvein watched as red circles appeared in the distance, on the ground; an overlay of his vision thanks to Quark and Eliot.

  Other dots appeared further afield, at the low building that served as the main defense they had to assault, and on the gate itself. Those other dots rapidly shifted colors and soon the field was populated.

  Platinum Princess asked, “Red is emplacement, yellow is an unknown issue, green is personnel?”

  “Correct,” VeryHuman said.

  Punchman slammed his fists together, saying, “Time to get punching!”

  Blackvein said, “Here we go.”

  And then Blackvein took off, flying across the land, caltrops propelling him forward. For a moment, nothing happened except for all of his team rushing at the gate.

  Platinum Princess moved like she was on a stroll, moving like she was fast forwarding on a screen. Miss Masher launched forward, one step on the ground propelling her forward like a minor rocket. Punchman was keeping up with Masher, but making sure Masher took the lead. VeryHuman was on automated ice skates that might have also been chainsaws, ripping the ground and moving him forward just as fast as everyone else.

  The turrets opened, popping out of the ground like silver trash cans that extended, extended, extended upward, and then they curved, and Blackthorn almost freaked out. Those were not normal turrets at all. They were barrels, each a meter wide, each on a tentacle-like protrusion that held those 10-meter long barrels into the air and pointed them at the team.

  They were kaiju laser guns.

  They were something special.

  They had no vectors in them, either, so Mark couldn’t—

  And then Quark flexed himself in Mark’s helmet, calculating angles of attack, forming lines in his vision that pointed at the ground all around them. The team faltered. It was still 200 meters to the operations building. There were 27 of these guns in the way, over a few hundred meters-wide angle of the gate.

  VeryHuman called out, “They’re not going to hit us right away! It’ll be warning sho—”

  “HALT, INTRUDERS! CEASE YOUR ADVANCE!”

  The voice was booming, mechanical.

  And then one of the kaiju tentacle guns fired a pulse of energy, like a massive flashlight turning on, only briefly.

  A line of fire coruscated across the path of the team and the world turned to heat and light, flames flashing outward, obliterating the snow.

  No one expected that. They were supposed to be bullets that would miss and that Miss Masher could tank, in a fashion.

  Mark was in a Union with all of his team, but the land ahead was blocked from him by Tartu’s anti-Union Domains. There was no one to actually target yet, otherwise Mark would have taken them down from here.

  Mark made a decision, pulling on Sally with his Union, and Sally responded by running closer. Mark stood on her shoulders and grabbed Eliot with a flick of adamantium turning into a handle, pulling Eliot in. And then Eliot was holding on to Sally’s back, and Mark huddled down with Sally grabbing his left leg to hold him there, while she Tactile Telekinesis’d with his black webweave socks to hold him better.

  His adamantium was already out and forming large disks, thin yet still made of adamantium.

  “Rush it,” Blackvein said.

  They had only slowed a little but now Masher put on speed, running fast, directly into the line of fire.

  The turrets did not fire. Not right away. Mark caught a wisp of the intent controlling the tentacle lasers. They were surprised that Mark kept going. In the distance, far behind where Mark and them had come from, flashing blue and red lights spun on top of hovercars. Police cruisers, and also the Memphi Guard.

  It was to be a pincer attack, then.

  But Sally could run damned fucking fast when she really needed to.

  All of the laser cannons were focused on them, now, and Mark had to turn his helmet into another shield, because the angles of attack from the turrets meant that—

  It was light and fire, but that light and fire fell upon black disks each two meters across. Eight disks, eight turrets aiming directly at Sally, Mark, and Eliot. They had to be at low power. Just enough to give a guy third degree burns over their entire body and to put them down onto the ground until medics could arrive. Sally didn’t care about the fire. She was tougher than that. Eliot and Mark were the only truly vulnerable people here, the entire time, and Sally was holding on to their clothes, onto Mark’s shoes and Eliot’s trench coat with her TT, giving them solid surfaces to ‘hold’ onto.

  Mark tanked the blasts 8 at a time. There were some overlaps of trajectory.

  Isoko went wide while cannons fired at her, but the cannon fire was useless against her. It splashed away, reflected almost. Those two cannons rapidly focused on Mark.

  Nothing attacked Punchman at all.

  And then Sally was near one of the tendrils and Eliot was on the case.

  Suddenly the tendril went rigid and then it focused and spun around, fast as a dervish, and focused on one of the other turrets in the area. A much, much more powerful blast of light flowed out of that turret and blasted the base of the other one, severing it to a stump.

  The turrets changed angles and went for the one Mark was now guarding, that Eliot was now hacking. It was hot down here, at the base. Sally kinda chuckled as she looked up at the fire blasting all of them.

  Isoko crashed into the base of another turret tendril, ripping it apart with her sword. It was not a clean cut at all—

  “It’s gonna blow!” Eliot announced.

  Mark fell into a flow.

  Sally sparkled gold as she ran fast away from the illuminating tendril turret.

  Four other turrets in the area rapidly began to glow, their blasts cutting off. And then Sally, Mark, and Eliot were closer to the main barracks up ahead while a chain reaction of explosions took out turret after turret behind them.

  Eliot yelled, “Yes! The chain reaction took!”

  Mark tanked four more fire blasts while healing his people while Punchman and Isoko crunched their way through two other turrets—

  All around the entire gate district the turrets suddenly flexed, like a ripple had taken hold, and then they shuddered to rigidity and slipped back into their holes in the ground.

  Eliot had done that; had wrested control of the system from whoever was controlling it inside of the operations center.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Eliot dropped off of Sally’s back and skated on silver boots that looked remarkably similar to whatever the material was that made up the turret back there, saying, “I have control of the turret system. It’ll take an hour to repair and these ones won’t come back as strong at all.”

  Blackvein reformed his helmet as he floated off of Masher’s shoulders, saying, “Advance.”

  Masher and Punchman formed the tip of the spear, supported by Blackvein and Princess’s Unions, while VeryHuman tapped away at control systems in the air. Red emplacements in Blackvein’s vision began to flicker and turn blue.

  Some of the blue flickers turned back to red, some turrets trying to shove back out of their holes in the ground, to turn and attack, some vectors inside of those turrets trying to reestablish control. But VeryHuman was on the job. His control didn’t work at that great of a distance, at the hundreds of meters between here and the turrets on the other side of the control building up ahead, and on the other side of the gate itself. He wasn’t a Techie, he wasn’t a Seer, and he certainly didn’t have a long range Power.

  But with enough Manipulation and force, Eliot could break through most Techie control. All he had to do was replace the systems that were in the systems, make them loyal to him, and overwhelm any other system out there.

  Masher reached the low building and with a seismic punch she cracked the concrete structure, the force of her blow like a splash of lightning into the concrete, spreading out her overwhelming attack, creating fault lines. The building cracked open, breaking down and in—

  Some of Tartu’s Domains cracked, inside, allowing Mark a glimpse of the forces arrayed against them.

  It was honestly a lot less than Mark expected.

  There were the actors, of course. Those people were spread everywhere inside, some of them in formation. Mark assumed that the people standing in formations were dressed in black and yellow like the guards of Memphi. Some of the vectors were separate from the rest, seated here and there around the place. Those vectors were stretched far and wide. Techies in the turrets? Maybe. Or were they acting for the cameras in there?

  At least one of them seemed to be fighting Eliot directly.

  Mark braindanced that specific person’s wakefulness and gave it to his entire team, while giving that guy sleepiness in turn. That vector slumped on his chair, sleeping.

  Eliot instantly gained the full upper hand on all of the turret internal-warfare.

  Mark flashed sleepiness into everyone he could inside of the building, except for Tartu, Kardi, Shawn and Lenny, who Mark only glimpsed before Tartu put the anti-Union Domain back up. Tartu rapidly expanded that Domain, but not before Mark managed to drop half of the forces inside that building.

  Punchman, Masher, and Princess had not been idle, and neither had anyone else inside.

  While Mark floated guard over Eliot, the others broke the building, smashing and crashing. Punchman grabbed at least a hundred tons of concrete and otherwise and in a supreme act of power (which was probably 1/100th of his actual power as Titanfist) Punchman flashed his Tactile Telekinesis through some support structures in the building, cracking them with subtle pressure, and then he lifted off a full 3/4ths of the building’s roof into the air. He roared, he lifted, and he threw the weight into the distance, about a hundred meters further north.

  It was not as much as he could have done.

  Masher still giggled and exclaimed, “Holy shit, Punchy!”

  Punchman’s action had exposed a hive of bees that rushed out onto the battlefield. All of them were actors.

  It was a melee where no one got hurt, but everyone got to show their shit. It was chaotic. It was a mess. 20 ‘soldiers’, most of them with Healthy Body or Strength —just ‘Strength’! That meant a modifier of 1.5x to 2x. Barely enough to qualify as ‘brawny’— all went down to the backside of Princess’s blade or Masher’s punches, or Punchman’s inability to be taken down. Punchman didn’t fight guards, but he let them try to fight him. Eventually the girls came and got the bees off of him.

  The melee lasted 45 seconds.

  Tartu and his team waited, furious, just outside of sight. Punchman had broken the Domain with his touch, but then Tartu put his anti-Union Domain back up and they vanished to Mark’s senses—

  Quark flickered a warning in Mark’s vision, behind them.

  A hero was here? Ah, well. Shit? That shouldn’t have happened until the second half of this scenario.

  Lawful Goose was on the field, heading in on the police cruisers… but now that they were getting closer Mark realized most of the cruisers were actually empty. Lawful Goose’s voice echoed across the land, “We’re a bit tied up with issues right now, so could you cease your attack please, Mister Blackvein! Leave now, thank you!”

  Was this part of the show?

  Mark looked to Eliot, and also to Quark in his vision.

  Eliot was deep in the manipulatable guts of the gate district, rerouting things far below, changing up systems with all of the care of a gardener with a Stoneshaper Power and a whole bunch of weeds to remove. He still managed to come out of it a little, to say, “No kaiju yet. Kaiju signs are growing. They’re being masked. The scenario is still a go.”

  Quark confirmed as much with some text in Mark’s vision, reading, ‘Mayor Ramirez wishes you luck in the coming firestorm. She expects an eruption of kaiju in 3 hours. There will be at least 12 of them.’

  Mark’s heart beat hard and his world focused.

  They were telling him not to worry about the kaiju fight yet, to keep going.

  Mark wasn’t going to do that.

  Mark called out, “Scenario is over!” Quark whispered at Mark to repeat that, and then Mark spoke, his voice booming out of some speakers Quark had created on his back, “Scenario is over! We have MAYBE a few hours to prepare the place! Everyone stop fighting.”

  Lawful Goose announced, “Yes! Stop fighting and leave the gate to us heroes!”

  “Change of plans!” Mark announced, “Keep fighting!”

  Isoko laughed loud and free as she leapt right at Tartu and company, crossing the distance fast—

  Tartu shot her with the same slowing Domain as before—

  But Sally was right there with her, and the slowing Domain broke when it tried to influence two people. Shawn and Lenny didn’t move, they didn’t fight when the two girls struck the anti-Union Domain, which popped that Domain and allowed Mark to pierce their defenses and send them all crashing to their sleep. Shawn and Lenny had heard Mark and now Tartu was mad that they didn’t try to fight Mark, but Tartu just sighed before he collapsed, too, anger and sleep filling his everything.

  Kardi fought Mark’s command to sleep remarkably well. Long enough to call out, “Beware the light…” And then collapsed to the ground, asleep.

  Isoko scoffed at her, saying, “Scene stealer.”

  “She’s fucking creepy, is what she is,” Punchman said, walking closer to them, to look down at Kardi.

  Mark wholly agreed.

  Isoko looked down at the sleeping actors, then asked, “So we’re, uh… helping them up and evacuating them, yeah?”

  Mark began waking people up, saying, “Yes.” And then he turned and looked up at Lawful Goose, who was standing on the roof of one of the empty police cruisers far away, remaining at the expected edge of Mark’s range. “Quark, help me out here.” Quark flickered a message that speakers were online and that he was connected into the main channel for the directors and such. Briefly, Mark heard people talking about camera angles on the downed guys, but Mark cut in, asking, “Is Lawful Goose coming to pick the guys up? We need to get them all out of here.”

  Noel’s voice cut through the chatter, “It’s a bit early but yeah. Full evacuation. Lawful Goose is coming in with some cruisers to pick them up. Can Eliot— Is Eliot here?”

  “I’m here,” Eliot said.

  “Let Lawful Goose come in and take an exchange of prisoners. Make it a scene, please, and then put a bow shot from one of the laser turrets across the fleeing vessels. I’m getting a new warning from Mayor Ramirez that this thing needs to wrap up right now. We can resume it when the attack is over. Expected beginning of the attack is in 2 hours, at 9:50ish AM. And then when that’s over we can finish the show!”

  There was a lot of hope in Noel’s voice, that this was going to be an easy day. That the city would not fall.

  It was a pretty normal hope.

  Mark said, “Copy that. Orders received.”

  And then Lawful Goose came in and Mark and the crew did a little forced marching of the ‘Memphi Guards’ into the getaway vehicles, along with Tartu, Lenny, Shawn, and Kardi.

  Eliot had smartly formed some silencers that they wrapped around the hero’s faces, preventing them from speaking.

  But Isoko was closest to Kardi as Kardi stepped into the vehicle alongside Lawful Goose, alongside the rest of that team, and she wanted to make a scene. She asked, “What did you mean by that, Kardi? ‘Beware the light’?” And then she unsnapped Kardi’s gag.

  Kardi grinned, her gag hanging from her cheek. “You think I know why I say what I say all the time? I do not. I am simply a conduit for the best possible results for everyone.”

  Punchman, as Titanfist, told her, “That’s a fucking dangerous way to live your life, girl.” He ignored whatever Kardi tried to say in response, shoving her into the cruiser, to fall into a bunch of the gagged guards. Titanfist asked Lawful Goose, “You’re coming back?”

  “Probably not,” Lawful Goose said. “I am being deployed to the northern river gate. Wolf Bayou might come this way. Red Wolf might try to link up. She knows that Mark is here, and if the enemies have brains she can explode them quite well. Do not expect to face enemies with brains, though. The attack is highly planned.” He looked to Mark and Titanfist. “You might need to go rescue Wolf Bayou, but maybe not. Keep that in mind.” And then he slapped the roof of his transport.

  The door closed.

  They flew away.

  Eliot had the turrets follow them like sunflowers following the sun, but he did not have them fire.

  Isoko asked, “Why no fire?”

  “I was getting power fluctuating error reports so I didn’t do it.” Eliot turned to the low building with the mostly-destroyed first floor. “I have to fix their entire power structure so that they do not overload at all, when I actually have to use them properly. It was too easy to make those ones out there explode. I think they installed these ones at the last minute.”

  Sally grumbled, “Laser cannons weren’t on the list of things I was expecting at all.”

  Mark asked, “What can I do, Eliot?”

  Isoko, Sally, and Mark were prepared to help. Titanfist was prepared to help, too, which was a nice surprise, but not a real surprise, like the tentacle cannons had been.

  And soon, all of them were doing something.