Chapter 13

  Gwyn laid naked in Nick’s bed, and he had never been more nervous. Given that he’d recently been turned into a tentacle monster, that was saying something. Every curve of her was perfect, and he found himself absently stroking along her soft thigh or the smooth swell of her hips as she waited for him.

  YOU SURE YOU DON’T WANT

  TO WAIT ANOTHER 5 YEARS?

  IT WOULD BE COOL TO BE A WIZARD

  Gwyn let out a chuckle that set all of his senses ablaze, and sent whatever he had instead of a heart into overdrive. She sat up, leaning forward to pull him close.

  “What I want,” she purred, taking the tip of one if his tentacles between her fingers. She brought it to her lips, and kissed it softly. He could feel her breath as she continued, “is for you to wear me like a fucking gl-.”

  Nick was 99% sure that word was going to be glove, but it was drowned out as his comm activated itself.

  “Red alert!” blasted Bubb-Bill’s voice, louder than usual. “The Camp Dodge ARMOR installation is under attack by a force of unidentified Altereds! If you are receiving this, consider it your deployment notice, Samsara is on her way!”

  “Babe? What’s—" Gwyn started, before a hand reached through a swirling mandala, yanking Nick through.

  “Fucking come ON!” She shouted to the ceiling, and the uncaring god of gash guarding.

  Qi had her claws on Cait’s shoulders, pressing her to the mattress. Her tongue was nearly down Cait’s throat while she ground her pussy lips along Cait’s shaft, psyching herself up to take the Amazon inside. She moaned into the kiss, finally ready to take things further when both of their eyes shot open and Bubb-Bill’s voice rang in their ears.

  Qi let out a groan that turned into a full throated roar, frustration leaving her in a gout of flame towards her, fortunately fireproof, ceiling. Her scales were already growing and thickening to a more useful form than the sexy female fantasy armor shape they usually took. Cait was stuck under the dragon, but let her supersuit’s constituent nanobots seep out of her pores, putting much more material than she’d like between her and Qi. They didn’t even have time to get out of bed before Samsara yanked them through a portal.

  Kennedy held her lower lip between her teeth, and had just snaked her hand down her jeans when the announcement hit her. She felt her own shock mirrored by Cait, replacing the lust and pleasure she’d been enjoying by-proxy. A moment later, their link cut off, and Kennedy frowned as she lost her abs.

  I should probably stop relying on Cait for physical fitness, she thought, poking at the soft flesh of her tummy where the toned muscle had just been.

  Then a flash, and she was being pulled through a portal.

  She was pretty sure she heard Samsara mutter, “Jesus Christ, Kennedy. Is anyone on your team not fucking right now?”

  Dawn was alone on the couch, save for Salad who was happily curled up in her lap. Cait really didn’t give the poor gentleman enough attention, and he purred happily as she scratched behind his neck. David Attenborough discussed the migration habits of penguins on the big screen, and Dawn shivered at the thought of ever going to the arctic.

  She was startled enough by the announcement to disturb Salad, who fortunately hopped of her lap before she was whisked away.

  Dawn fell into the back lines of a melee. When Altered clashed with Altered, the world shook. On the far side, a thin smattering of ARMOR troops fired at the mass of Altereds who had made short work of most of their forces. It seemed like those few that remained only survived because AEGIS had opened up a new front behind the invaders. Anger flashed through Dawn’s heart. She would not lose another city.

  The ARMOR officers were ineffective, to say the least. She summoned a great thorned barrier around them, cutting them off, but hopefully keeping them safe, and scanned the battlefield. She found Kennedy first, as the girl reached out to borrow her power. Dawn could feel the backflow from Cait through her, and was glad that her teammate hadn’t been taking on Altereds as a baseline human.

  Dawn rushed over to where Kennedy was faced off with a fire and ice pair she was expertly playing against one another. Dawn watched as a swing exposed her to a blast of ice, but the same movement brought the frozen area in front of a blast of fire, freeing her hand and causing a gout of steam. Kennedy leapt through it, staff coruscating with corrosive energy as it tore through the ice user, who dissipated into a fluttering pile of pages.

  “Kennedy!” pleaded the fire user, “Be reasonable! There’s no need for-.”

  The tip of her staff burst through its skull and it too fell away into pages.

  “Hey Dawn,” Kennedy greeted, giving a tight grin. “Good timing, that was a stalemate without some offensive firepower I was used to.”

  “Did you… know them?”

  Kennedy gave a sharp shake of her head, but didn’t offer anything further.

  “C’mon Dawn, lets link up with the rest of the te-.”

  A familiar blue blur flashed past with a crack, and Kennedy fell to the ground, out cold. The same blur shot up to Dawn, stopping for just long enough to look her over.

  “What an interesting creature you are,” Chance said, with a voice that wasn’t his own, before Dawn’s world went black.

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  Cait felt Kennedy’s link cut, and was barely able to force down the panic. She and Qi were back to back, wreaking havoc on the weaker Altereds, who bizarrely seemed to be made of paper. She hadn’t found one yet that could take a punch from her, and whoever had put this attack together had focused more on killing power than crowd control. That meant it was a slaughterhouse in front of Cait, since they could hit her with as many punches or energy blasts as they wanted, it wasn’t going to do shit.

  She shook away the cloud of pages the guy with energy blades for arms had dissipated into after she put a fist through his chest, and looked to where she’d last felt Kennedy. As she found them, she saw Dawn fall to a blow from…. Fucking Freeflow?

  “Qi! I gotta go, you good?” Cait yelled, already moving. The dragon roared in response, roasting her current opponent, a thin grey man who left desiccated plant life wherever he walked.

  Was that Old Man Winter?

  Cait shook off the speculation, but couldn’t quite deny the feeling that a hell of a lot of these fuckers seemed both very familiar, and very dead.

  “Hey!” she yelled over general comms. “Just saw Freeflow clock Wilds Witch, no fucking clue what’s going on, but be on your guard, he could be anywhere.”

  She tripped, and looked up to see the speedster standing above her. He held his hands behind his back in an oddly formal posture, alien to the laid back athlete he’d been when he wasn’t kicking her ass.

  “Rude of you to spoil the surprise,” he said, vocal cords producing a voice they never had previously. “You’re a new one.”

  “And you’re not Chance,” Cait growled, pulling herself off the ground with a booming uppercut the speedster easily dodged. Just like in their training sessions, a kick found the back of her knee and she was back on the ground.

  “Very durable!” Not-Chance complimented, casually as if this were a conversation over tea. “I do believe that broke this foot! I’ll have to keep an eye on you.”

  Cait remembered an early training session with Chance, and turtled up. She heard a scoff from above.

  “Maybe not that tough then. Ah wel-.”

  Nick had seen Kennedy and Dawn fall as well. He was getting better every day at parsing the panoramic scope of his perception, and had made sure to keep track of his friends. He was on the move before Cait, but saw the Amazon struggling with Freeflow and knew that wildly throwing himself into the fray wouldn’t accomplish anything. Instead, he tapped Bullrush on the shoulder as the Minotaur used his shiny new blaster arm to finish off a woman who had come at him with knives for teeth and apparently, hope.

  SLINGSHOT! He sent over comms, resisting the wince as he heard his stupid foppish accent.

  Bullrush nodded. They’d come up with the move while hunting Ironhide, and had practiced it in the gym a couple times since. Nick wrapped two tentacles each around Bullrush’s horns, and used another to guide his head like the horns were iron sights. He coiled the muscles of his launch arms as tight as he could, and waited. When Freeflow stopped to mock Cait for assuming the fetal position, he loosed.

  Bullrush let out a strained moo as his neck sustained 4 tons of force. That same force shot Nick forward fast enough to break the sound barrier, and he spun himself, finding his perception sped up as he did, one more perk of this weird body. He saw Freeflow’s eyes flick towards him in the instant before one of his tentacles sheared through his temple, neatly cutting off the top of his skull as the speedster collapsed into pages.

  He dug tentacles into the ground, dragging himself to a stop to check on Cait. The woman was already up, sprinting towards where a hulking figured approached Kennedy’s prone form.

  “Get Dawn!” she yelled, and Nick scurried over to find the deer shivering and foaming at the mouth.

  SAMSARA! EVAC ON ME, FOR WILDS WITCH! An instant later, Dawn flashed away, and Nick had to hope whatever care AEGIS gave her would be enough.

  Cait swung towards the towering figure, but it was faster than it looked, dancing out of the way. Cait spun, hissing as her suspicions were confirmed. She’d seen that face in training, and seen it in a coffin. Roidrage smiled down on her, the face different from Freeflow’s, but the expression the same.

  “Interesting indeed,” he rumbled, the erudite intonation sounding odd coming from his craggy features and deep gravely voice. “Who are you, exactly?”

  He swung downwards, and Cait locked in a cross block, but felt herself sink a full foot into the earth as it impacted.

  “I’m a bad matchup, motherfucker!” Cait yelled, straining against his weight.

  Roidrage let out an eerily good-natured laugh.

  “I simply cannot wait for you to die!”

  “Weird fucking thing to say,” Cait growled, wrenching one foot out of the ground to dodge the next blow. Wouldn’t do to let herself get pounded six feet deep. She watched the giants stance, realizing it basically wasn’t one.

  This motherfucker doesn’t know what he’s doing, Cait realized.

  His next punch was telegraphed like he was using semaphore, and she ducked under it, driving a blow up through his stomach, feeling the spine crack on the other side as the giant sighed.

  “Such difficult little Characters. I get more chances than you do, fascinating creature.” The giant intoned as he disintegrated into a cloud of paper.

  Kennedy was pulling herself to her feet as Cait ran over. She grabbed an arm to help her up, but Kennedy slapped her away.

  “Don’t FUCKING touch me!” she screamed, eyes wild, searching frantically. Cait tried to pull her mind towards her, but didn’t know how. She didn’t have time to try any harder, since the fight wasn’t over. A bizarre centipede woman reared up behind Kennedy, who, for now, was a regular-ass human. Cait dashed around her, catching the thing’s pincers as it struck down towards Kennedy.

  Survive first, trauma second. She activated her explosive strikes, and the pincers ripped off the monstrous Altered as her arms shot forward, spiraling off into the melee.

  “Come now,” said that annoyingly calm voice, filtered through female vocal cords. “At least pretend I’m hurting you.”

  Cait exploded the mouth it had come from with a fist and turned back to Kennedy as pages fell around her.

  “Kennedy!” she yelled. “I need you to link with me or run! I just found you, and I’m not fucking losing you here!”

  The girls eyes cleared for a moment, and she nodded. Cait felt her mind reach tentatively for hers, and as much as she wanted to grab it to her own and wrap it in all the armor she could offer, she just waited, the emotional equivalent of arms wide open.

  As the link stabilized, she felt Kennedy’s wild, unreasoning panic and terror.

  This isn’t from that hit, she knows that voice.

  Cait knew words weren’t going to help, so she leant support to the collapsing beams of Kennedy’s mind, and smiled wide.

  “Let’s let some of that rage out, yeah?” she said. Cait felt some of Kennedy’s fear sharpen into anger, and her black glossed lips parted in a feral grin.

  “Yeah. Lets.”

  They kicked ass. The invaders didn’t seem to have anyone left that could slow Cait down, and Kennedy fought with a cold kind of fury that sent a pinprick of fear down even Cait’s spine. With nothing more than the increased endurance and durability she got from Cait, she danced through the fight, taking down one Altered invader after another as they were focused on Cait.

  Once she got going, Cait felt Kennedy’s panic shift to a manic kind of joy, and she rent open a connection to Qi. Shimmering black scales burst through her skin, and she was unstoppable. If whatever these things were had actually been living, they stopped the second they got Kennedy’s attention. Eventually, Cait ran out of targets, and just watched in awe as she rampaged.

  Black flames roasted enemies before they could run, and razor sharp talons shredded their bodies and the pages they disintegrated into. Then a fridge hit her in the head at mach 1 and she was down for the count twice in one day.

  Cait followed the trajectory of the hostile home appliance and groaned.

  “Man, I don’t fucking want to kill Garbagedump.”