“Upload all your data, and you’ll walk away free of holes.” The man beckoned Black to give up the goods.

Black laughed so hard that he pressed his face into the asphalt to suppress the snort. “It’s never boring this close to the city, is it?” The man, clearly unnerved, unloaded a couple of bullets in his back and took a step back.

“Sir, you hoped to pick off an exhausted fighter after a long fight?” Black reared up to his feet and put on a show of beating his chest, free from the exhaustion he felt moments ago. A metallic clang rang out, betraying that the first bullets merely met a metallic plate.

The man flinched. “I, uh…” He turned tail and ran. Some fights are won just by posturing the right way.

Black looked around to see a huge party of people evacuating their hiding spots to flee. It would have been pretty bad if they all decided to unload into him. He wasn’t armored. Not really. Just the plate on his chest and back. The back one, unfortunately, was the one that got the most use. Yes, run! A sense of confidence flowed through him. His soul crackled like a fire! Wait… that crackling isn’t coming from my soul. He looked around. It was a chirping device he’d recently installed. His Geiger counter.

“Oh… shit.” Shadows fell on Black, and the fleeing people suddenly started to make more sense. He looked back to see the entire street behind him evaporating in a plume of dust. Epicenter? That freakazoid he just buried.

Black could do nothing but run as the block behind him started to turn to ash. The street under his foot began to crumble as loads began to outweigh the structural stability of hard asphalt and concrete. Black wasn’t running from the evaporating streets, exactly, because he was far more concerned with the consequences of not reigning in your power so close to the city. A block or two is fine, but when you start destroying more than that in one go, well… Black looked up at the sky and ran to the rendezvous point. He saw Scarlet’s red clothes and Gray was… unconscious again? Good, she hadn’t made it to the basement yet, and Bec wouldn’t slow them down.

“SCARLET!” He waved at her to get her attention. Her expression when she saw him was priceless. He’d be saving that image for sure.

“Black! What in high heavens did you do! Again?”

“I just got caught up in a fight!” Scarlet joined Black in the mad sprint now with Bec dangling loosely under Scarlet’s arm like an American football.

“Why do you always have to piss off the nuclear types? This is just like high school… and college… and our last trip to Lanval.”

“Yeah, with one key difference from that last one.” Air raid sirens started to blare, and speakers scattered in the area started to incant a warning. “Code Black: Person of Mass Destruction Detected. Rail Drive in 2 minutes.”

Scarlet shouted over the loud klaxon, “I think they renamed these kinds of events after you, Black! AmiGo probably finds this hilarious.”

Black cursed. “Scarlet! Do you see a basement we can hide in?”

“Will a basement even save us?” It was in moments that Scarlet wished she knew how to teleport long distances with multiple people in tow. She grabbed Black and started whipping forward in small jumps. She could move him without touching him, but she’d needed to keep an eye out for drift each time they jumped if he wasn’t touching her.

They found a building with a standalone basement. They didn’t need to look farther than the façade, simply because they had studied the building templates employed by the bot fleet in school. Jumping through the doors, the sirens remind them that doom was coming within the minute. Scarlet chucked Bec into a corner and started pulling every barricade she could out of thin air. She would need to exhaust her cache in the area now or she wouldn’t be alive to use them later. The long black bars adhered to the wall and spindled out hexagonal struts that multiplied and expanded. Soon the walls and ceiling were honeycombed entirely with glowing blue shielding that faded into invisibility.

Black spent all his time on the weak spot, the door. He used a hexagonal plating, like the other barricades, but much denser. He started slotting raw Fabric power cells into the wall in each spot, causing blue energy began to hum. “10 seconds.”

He assembled the shielding piece by piece lighting fast. Scarlet was too busy to see Black slot his left arm into the final spot. “5 seconds.”

He starts to meditate. Drawing energy into his center. Gathering everything he could, he became the last battery in the barricade.

“Rail Drive Inbound.”

There was no rumble or build up. It just felt like the entire world jumped. The energy was pulled into the plate, and the world flipped up and down and rocked side to side with a thunderous boom. A metallic smell filled the air. Black screamed as he was encased in a red-hot metal cage, being branded from all sides. His clothes began breaking down by the rush of ambient Fabric being forced to pass through orderly material. It began to sublimate and return to the ether, revealing the scorching hot metal frame lining his body struggling to empower the kinetic shielding of the door and walls. Scarlet lobbed buckets of summoned water on him to keep him cool as he overheated like a decade-old laptop running the newest game on the market.

Suddenly, the violent earth crack ended. It was quiet. Black, now bright red from severe burns, ripped his arm from the socket and fell to the floor on his back, breathing heavily.

Another man, pale white, laid in a crater several blocks wide. Atomized tungsten hovered in the air as he laid there, naked and steaming. He coughed and rolled on his side to find a more comfortable position.

They both groaned. “Ouch.”