“I-I have to see one of them before I do that,” Lania squeezed out as we ran towards the conflict ahead. We could definitely hear the sounds of significant property damage taking place now.

“There’ll probably be dead ones in human clothes left behind by Mr. Hill?” I replied to her statement.

“I-I...”

“You want me to kill one of them and watch them revert,” I sighed.

“Can’t you just, um, knock one out?” she had to ask.

“Skrulls can hold a shapeshift when unconscious, and if they are well-trained, even when dead sometimes. I’ll have to kill them and disrupt their Kirlian Aura as I do it,” I chided her gently. “Didn’t fan-girl enough on aliens?”

“Ugh, no...”

“So, while carrying you, dodging ray guns, and looking for human survivors, you want me to kill an untransformed Skrull or two, just so you can watch them turn to furrow-chinned green space aliens, instead of believing the corpses scattered or smashed around by The Mountain are any kind of proof.”

She kind of slumped against my back, grabbing harder as we started passing the buildings at the outskirts of town, most of them within her killzone and ominously quiet. The fighting going on up ahead was definitely audible, and smoke was rising in several areas. “Well...”

“Don’t worry about it.” I flicked up a trio of glowing Cards. “I suppose I had to go public sometime, right?” I asked rhetorically.

“Thank you...” she said, staring at the glowing Cards.

“You just be ready to turn that killzone on and wipe these bastards out.”

------

The road going through the middle of the city had been lined with trees. Those were all stripped of leaves and dead, shriveled and withered down to husks, as were the lawns of the homes and businesses that they were in front of.

Lania tensed up at the sight of the devastation she’d caused, of cars off the road, doors open, and only bare indicators that there had been anyone inside them.

I went to the roads behind them, where the people had been living.

The Commune had already gone off, and I’d already asked my questions.

There were only three humans alive in the bounds of the city, two of whom were outsiders... and one of those was an Avatar of Earth.

I was closing in rapidly on The Mountain’s rampage through the subdivisions. King Gravity was coming down, houses were imploding, while occasionally a car or tree went tumbling through the air, sometimes with figures splayed against them.

A dog, keeping a safe distance, barked at me. Looked like a German Shepherd mix.

My hand flicked out as, utterly shocking Lania, I sent a Card into and through its head, discharging a Shocking Grasp into it with terminal power.

The Skrulls, as I recalled, used a biomorphing art which certain alchemical disciplines were based on, stretching out their vital organs and moving them around their bodies. It meant that shooting them in the head might cripple them, but not kill them, and they could actually come back from all but the most lethal injuries with time and their shapechanging skills regrowing what they had lost.

But the Card blew its brain apart and totally fried its central nervous system as it did so. It lost control of its morph, and the dog yelped and kicked, spasming purple as its form shifted, and a shocked Skrull with the furrowed chin, green skin, and purple morph-wear hit the ground, shock in his green eyes at the hole between them and the wedge extending through from it, smoking and extending right through to the back of its skull.

Lania would have shrieked and tried to look away, except she saw another Skrull in the remains of a tribal skirt crushed under a car, green blood staining the ground. There was another one with its head crushed, dressed in a shirt and pants far too small for it that it had ripped its way out of... a child’s clothes.

“Oh, spirits...” she murmured, eyes wide as I kept moving forwards.

The Red Eyes were shifting. We had been noticed, someone was spreading word.

An older woman came screeching out of a house, moving with far too much energy for her age... and firing a very un-Tribal ray gun at us with decent reflexes and aim.

Trying to hit someone to whom she was moving in slow motion didn’t work too well, and I brought my arm up and flicked out another Card, driving it into her chest and dumping its whole load into her thoracic cavity, frying her insides.

She flew backwards, hit the wall, and a green, furrow-chinned, purple-suit-wearing alien adorned in her shawl and beads hit the ground in a row of finely-ordered petunias.

“Mrs. Winding-Rivers...” Lania trailed off.

“Maybe in its refrigerator,” I sniffed. “There are three humans in this city right now, two of them foreigners.” I ducked behind a house as two ray blasts exploded against the side of it, but rather than going around it, I went up, ignoring her weight as I bounced to the slope of the roof, and the two shooters, angling to cover the sides and back yard, didn’t look up in time as Cards shot out like living things and chopped into their heads.

Green bodies in purple, smoking and crackling and twitching, hit the ground.

“Mr. Hunts-Deer. Mr. Landing-Crows...” Lania shuddered on my back, thick emotions in the back of her throat.

“Being dissected on a table at these things’ base.”

She wanted to clutch at me, but I was too strong. “I’m-I’m bringing my Killzone back up!” she said in an awful, breaking voice, as I jumped down from the roof to avoid more shots coming my way.

“That is appreciated.”

There was something of an ominous build-up of power behind me. The current of energy she’d sent down one arm to mostly expend itself uselessly went back into its natural direction.

The air hissed around me and a wave of death boiled past, but I’d had time to solidify my immunity, and it barely made my skin rustle this time, although I could feel it hissing on my eyeballs.

The grass and trees around us began to mock-burn and molder away almost instantly, the effect spreading rapidly. I charged out from behind the trees towards the positions of the gunners shooting at me and the figure crashing through houses and trees to get at scrambling Skrulls trying real hard not to morph into forms that could fly away, despite cars and trees getting tossed at them. The target of their fire was just wading through the entire process as his Weight flattened them to the ground at his approach.

Mr. Hill noticed the direction of the shooting, and perhaps more importantly, he noticed along with everyone else the very rapidly expanding circle of death blazing across the lawns and sweeping over the disguised Skrulls.

They screamed as their fake skins ignited, and only got to half-morph before their flesh burned off their bones, then their bones fell apart as their purple suits went up in ashes. The ones already dead on the ground, smashed flat by cars or trees, didn’t react quite so badly, not absorbing the poison, but they were still sizzling.

I was dodging the incoming fire with speed, alacrity, and eight Red Eyes telling me to get out of the fucking way of those guns. There was an electrical component to the coherent energy of the things I was not going to be immune to, although the heat wouldn’t bother me, so I could still get a hole punched through me and be sent flying. Those little popguns were blowing chest-sized holes in the wooden and brick houses around, making cars explode, and putting head-sized potholes in the asphalt roads.

Mr. Hill was a bit trepidatious as the poison swept past and over him, tensing despite himself as I slowed down and stopped with him just inside the edge of it.

He inhaled deeply. “That tastes funny!” he announced, turning around as three ray-beams exploded against him brightly, barely moving him, and not even mussing the trenchcoat that shared his invulnerability.

I zipped forwards again. “Old man, the command-and-control center is under the lumber store down the road a half-klik that way. There’s only three humans left in this whole town.”

He looked at me, at the girl whose Killzone was wiping the Skrulls, and did the math as I leapt into the air at speed and came down upon the Skrulls. They screamed and tried to morph into something that would save them... and failed, burning away as I landed.

I heard the ground crunch from compression, and glanced back in time to see Mr. Hill shoot into the air in the direction I had pointed, while Lania wiped at tearful eyes, teeth grit as she saw the ‘people’ dying start to shift into things reptilian, stony, amphibian, tentacled, insectile... whatever came to mind, trying not to die, and failing as her Killzone took them.

“My school is that way. If they are pretending nothing is wrong, they might still be there.” She pointed as I swept towards the other Skrulls shooting at us, returning fire just enough to force their aim wide. They could only watch wide-eyed as lawns and trees blew into dissolving ash, and the edge of the killzone raced towards them irresistibly.

---

Only three humans in this town.

Nobody had ever accused The Mountain of too much empathy. He liked to fight, and had no problem killing those what needed killing. Sure, after he got his powers, he realized he had to hold back, or Primus might just come down and drop him into the sun.

A gentlemen’s agreement, it was, foolish and romantic and impractical. Don’t kill civilians at all. Don’t kill those who don’t clearly deserve it, or we will come and we will kill you. Property damage is fine, it can be fixed. Whaling on one another is fine, we can be fixed.

But if you want to kill, we are coming for you with everything, to give you back what you are putting out.

It had been his first time running into the Champions. Hercules had beaten him fair and square, wading through his Weight, hammering him with punches after grappling and pinning him, and he’d not been able to do much about it. The Greek god literally had thousands of years of hand-to-hand fighting experience with superstrength, and against those who were superstrong. He just had been unable to handle the guy.

The whole crew he’d been hired to pull the job with, a heist of some gold reserves from the trading bank, had been wrapped up by the Champions back then. Mechanar, that arrogant twit, had gotten himself disassembled by The Hag, his prized mechanical limbs and armor and jetpack and whatever shredded with breathtaking speed, and gone off to spend some time in lockdown before breaking out or being broken out by reserve forces, he couldn’t remember which.

Trying to build some place to contain Powered was a very pricey proposition that wasn’t going to work, as containing the inside of a place didn’t mean you had adequate protection from the outside. When Augataur the Brass Bull came thundering in through your walls to break out people, well, there’s a point of zero return.

Was it something of a farce on the surface? Sure it was, and everyone knew it. It was also damn entertaining, displayed energy and verve and power, and people had flocked to Los Angeles and San Francisco to be a part of it.

There were crews specialized just in jailbreaks, getting the guards out of the way with minimal harm, getting their targets out and onto the streets fast and clean, while other crews were equally skilled in rebuilding what had been taken down, and making sure normal humans didn’t go wandering off and making trouble. Having an actual murderer get free after one of your jailbreaks was bad news, and the crew would make very sure that no unintended escapees got out.