Chapter Text
“I don’t know.”
“Hm.” Tattletale’s smile turned lopsided. “That’s not the whole truth, now is it?”
Citrine shot her an irritable look. “He didn’t tell me in case I got captured here. Do you take him for a fool?”
“Obviously, but that’s besides the point.” She ignored the venomous glare she got. “You see, Miss Model Drone, there’s a difference between ‘I wasn’t told’ and ‘I don’t know’, though you might have to think for yourself a bit to spot it.”
I tightened my grip on the dagger against Citrine’s throat. “Tell us what you know about where Accord is and what his plans are. I don’t want to call in Samuel to help with the interrogation but we don’t have much time.”
“The torturer.” She frowned beneath her gilded mask, clearly weighing whether it would be worth it to try to delay us any further. “Last I saw him he went north, towards the docks.”
“Where you think he’s aiming to skip town in case things turn against him.” Tattletale finished what she left unsaid. “That’s got to sting. Not only didn’t he have faith you’d manage this for him, but he’s also ditching you if you don’t.”
“Accord has a plan. I don’t know the full extent of it but I trust that no matter the hardships, in the end I will be with him again, triumphant.” There was a forced calm to Citrine’s voice, eyes narrowed as she smiled thinly back at Tattletale.
“You know, blind faith really doesn’t suit you. But let’s see, Accord is prepared to cut his losses if he can’t win this battle, which, FYI, he won’t, according to our resident oracle.”
Cirine didn’t say anything.
“So his secondary goal is to salvage everything he can before running to China with his tail between his legs, while his primary goal is… What? Try to pin us down while getting his hired guns and Tinkertech into position to finish us off. What’s the stuff he’s been gathering in New Brockton for by the way?”
“I don’t-”
“Know? Sure you don’t, honey. Weapons material, chemical or biological? Oh but don’t tell me, you think he’s setting the stage for a weapon to obliterate the city and you’re hoping he’s going to use it to get you back and fear he’s just going to be spiteful and try to blow us all up?”
No answer.
Tattletale stared at her for several seconds. “Fuck. I was just spitballing here, but he’s really ready to go that far, and you support him?”
“It would just be a contingency, if it even was true. Likely wouldn’t even reach this side of the Portal.” Citrine seemed to have realised what an incredibly weak defence that was, because she promptly shut up.
“Citrine?” I said, very carefully. “Do you want to be complicit in the mass murder of everyone in New Brockton?”
“That’s a very loaded question, Skitter.”
“It’s a fair question, I think, under the circumstances. You called us children but do you want to be on the same side as the guy ready to throw a tantrum and flip the board if he loses? And make no mistake, he will lose, the numbers do not favour him.”
“... No.” She admitted, in the most grudging way possible.
“I’ll be upfront with you Citrine, I don’t want to kill you or hurt you, but with your power I don’t have a lot of ways to contain you in the heat of battle that doesn’t involve doing so. The only way I can think of is if I can trust you, and you haven’t given me a lot of reason to do so. Can I trust you, Citrine, if not to help us, then at least not try to stop us or make a break for it?”
“And if I say no, or I say yes but your Tattletale thinks that I lie, what will you do?”
“I’m not sure.” I spoke candidly. “Could have Regent try to hijack you but that’d take too long, I’m not willing to bet that you can’t use your powers if Juliette paralysed you, any mundane bindings would be a joke and if I knocked you out it might either kill you or have you wake up at the worst possible time.”
She looked to be regaining some degree of resolve again as she stared into my lenses before speaking. “You’re wrong about Accord.”
“Okay.” It didn’t seem relevant to me but I let her continue.
“Everything he did was only because he knew you wouldn’t understand his vision on how to better the world, and any measures he’s taken are done with the knowledge that you won’t allow innocents to die in mind. He will withdraw with what he needs to continue on his quest to fix everything that’s wrong with this world and you will accept it because it means the least harm for everyone. It’s a bitter end to what has been a fruitful partnership but it’s the only way this can go.”
“Right.” I allowed some scepticism to seep into my voice. It sounded more like she was rationalising the entire fucked up situation than anything else.
She took a deep breath. “So with this in mind, in the interest of keeping myself alive until all this pointless fighting is over, I swear I’ll be your model prisoner. I’ll be honest, make no attempts to escape or harm any of you.”
I looked over at Tattletale, who gave me a nod. “She’s good for it, she needs to be for her world to not fall apart.”
“Good.” I removed the knife from Citrine’s throat. “I’m sorry about Lizardtail by the way. He didn’t deserve to die.”
“No.” She agreed, her voice cold. “He did not.”
I was magnanimous enough in victory that I did not feel the need to point out that it wasn’t like her side had held back from using lethal attacks on us. It wouldn’t really do anything, not when she was so clearly bitter and in denial about the whole situation.
—
With Citrine handled, at least for the time being, and the Yàngbǎn routed by Glaistig Uaine, we were free to move on from this position, having secured Accord’s headquarters and half of his team. Good thing too because his counterassault was finally setting into motion.
The impression I got was that he’d intended for us to get trapped inside his headquarters, dealing with traps and Ambassadors on the inside and Yàngbǎn on the outside, unable to stop him from beating us in all other theatres of the war for the city. I wasn’t sure if it would have worked normally but the presence of the Fairy Queen had clearly thrown a large wrench into that plan.
“Grass A.” I said when Grue opened up communications again, more out of rote than anything. The code we used was really simple so if Accord was tapping in on us or coercing Grue he’d definitely know its meaning.
“Apple, A.” He responded. “Wait, shit.” It sounded like it had just dawned on him how ambiguous an apple would be in our colour coded system. “They’re pulling in reinforcements from Gimel. Tinkertech mercs by the looks of it. Professional but no powers seen among them so far. Imp got hurt fighting Othello and we’re having to fall back.”
“We’re on our way, try to contain them as best you can until then.” I wanted to tell him about the bomb Citrine suspected Accord had planted but I didn’t just in case he really was listening in on us and willing to actually deploy it. The last thing I wanted to do was make him decide to activate it early.
“Affirmative. We’ll do our best.” Grue was too professional to openly voice doubt, but I got the sense he didn’t think they’d be able to stop our foes from pushing them back or spreading out to other parts of the city if they wanted to between just the four of them.
Perhaps I should have sent some of our own soldiers to back them up, strengthen their number a bit, but I didn’t trust that none of them were secretly on Accord’s payroll and a betrayal, or even leak, would just have made the situation so much worse. Ultimately it came down to the same reason why I didn’t want to involve the Red Hand: I felt a lot safer with a smaller group I could trust to be on our side than a larger group I couldn’t.
Odd how I could extend that level of faith to a madwoman I just recently met but not a team I’ve been working beside for half a year. Not unreasonable, I thought, considering how Accord had been given much more of a chance to compromise one than the other, but still odd.
“I’m not asking for any unnecessary risks, even just a fighting retreat is enough. So long as they still feel some pressure.” I ended the call.
Between trying to catch Accord at the docks and containing the threat from New Brockton, the latter unfortunately took priority by far. For all I knew he had teleported to a ship already out at sea the moment we showed up at his door and the prospect of maybe getting him wasn’t good enough to outweigh the clear and imminent threat his goons were posing to both us and everyone around us.
Perhaps I could have dispatched the Heartbroken to try to see if they could get him, but the Portal wasn’t the only place Accord’s reinforcements were going after.
“Delphi should be safe, none heading her way.” While I spoke to Grue, Tattletale was combing through the tide of messages from her informants from around the city. “A couple of false leads, two of them have definitely been bribed or blackmailed and are trying to throw me off track.”
“He’s burning through all of his assets just to slow us down.” I observed.
“Yeah. Problem is I can guess where at least some of these people are heading, even if they’re taking a circuitous route.”
“Orphanage?”
“Orphanage.” She nodded.
“Damn it.” There had been good odds the orphanage would end up targeted according to Dinah, but I had hoped it wouldn’t happen. It made a twisted kind of sense from a very ruthless logic, serving either as a distraction or hostages and more powers for the Yàngbǎn. That’s why we’d asked Charlotte to stay inside for the last couple of days while we did all her errands for her, just in case they tried to Master her while she was exposed and vulnerable. She hadn’t minded, fortunately, even if I hadn’t mentioned why we wanted this. “Think they know about Aiden?”
“Based on the fact that they didn’t bother bringing any Ambassadors or Yàngbǎn with them? I’d say they do.”
Figured it had been too much to hope Accord wouldn’t have noticed the strange circumstances around Tattletale apparently single-handedly driving Galvanate’s Gang away after I got hit by a rocket and from there devoted some of his intellect to solve the puzzle. When we had planned for what he might do to stop us, kidnapping Aiden had fallen into the category of worst case scenario, and not just for ethical reasons. Normally, getting him to cooperate with them enough to use his powers for their cause might have been an issue, but with the Yàngbǎn involved they could always just cut out the middle man and put a gun to his head until he let them link up with him.
Aiden was probably the best counter to the Fairy Queen they would be able to pull out on short notice, since he could just turn off all of your powers by being close to you, making everyone except long range fighters or Tinkers useless against him. Not to mention the terrifying synergy between the other side of the coin he provided and the existing power sharing and boosting abilities of the Yàngbǎn.
When I first worried about what unscrupulous people might try to do with him I hadn’t thought my fears would come true so soon. Still, it was nothing we hadn’t planned for.
“How many?”
“Three separate groups of four each, from different locations taking different routes. Military grade, all of them.”
For twelve in total. Could the Heartbroken take them all on? Not without risking casualties and I’d rather not have dying kids on my conscience. I could go with them but I didn’t like leaving Glaistig Uaine without supervision and she was needed to help reclaim New Brockton and disable the bomb there.
“Contact some of our closest guys to help out, specifically ones who’ve worked with Regent and are susceptible to him.” That way we’d at least have insurance if they proved untrustworthy.
“And call Charlotte and tell her that people are coming to try to take the children. Again.” A note of frustration crept into my voice. “We’ll try to intercept them but just in case, have Meira create some golems to hold the door. See if Aiden can help make them bigger or something. She’s not to open the door for anyone except for Regent.”
“Got it.” Tattletale gave a thumbs up with her free hand, phone already pressed to her ear by the occupied one.
I walked over to Regent, who was alleviating his boredom waiting for action to resume by taking one of the gem-masks of a dead Yàngbǎn to inspect more closely.
“I don’t hate it.” Was his verdict. “Hey, Skitter.”
“New mission.” I got straight to the point. “A dozen mercenaries are trying to take advantage of the fighting to kidnap some parahuman kids from the orphanage.”
“Didn’t that place already get blown up?” I got the impression of a raised eyebrow beneath the mask. He tilted his head for emphasis.
“New place, here in Downtown. Tattletale can send you the address. Take the Heartbroken with you and fucking end them.” There was a buzzing noise as my swarm swallowed up the rage I was currently feeling. “I don’t care how you get it done, so long as none of the children are hurt. We’ll be sending some guys to help you out, control them if you have to.”
“Heh.” He looked to be grinning. “Can’t believe I used to call you a dork. Actually, you’re still a dork, but you’re the scariest dork I know of.”
“I have no idea what that’s even supposed to mean.”
“Of course you don’t. Dork.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ll be sure to bring some skulls back for your throne!” And with that he was gone.
“You have such a lively court.” Observed Glaistig Uaine while the Heartbroken milled out of the street, having approached me so silently I probably wouldn’t have noticed were it not for the ladybug embedded in her cloak. “I find myself rather enjoying it.” She had dropped the echo again now that there was no longer an audience I noticed.
“Glad somebody does.” I had to stop myself from pinching my nose. “Now come, let me introduce you to Earth Gimel, a world so much better than ours because of how few people live there.”
—
The benefit of having concentrated all of our forces in Downtown was that I didn’t have to move far to assist Grue’s group in their fight. The battle was still ongoing when I arrived, though our people didn’t look to be doing too well as far as I could tell. The cadavers of Parian’s puppets lied strewn across the entrance of the Portal Tower, which, at the moment, I was kind of regretting I had ordered to be built so defensible. The large front entrance, made to be wide and tall enough to easily allow trucks to go through, had its reinforced gates closed and, though punctured by what I assumed to be shots from Foil, still standing.
The high walls, with their almost pyramidic corners, were similarly unbreached, any windows being located on the upper floors, where I could sense troops taking position to get some overwatch over the surrounding neighborhood. Their weapons were of a different model than those that Coil’s guys used to carry, now that Toybox had been turned into a Slaughterhouse Nine base of operations, but I considered it safest to assume they were just as deadly. Their uniforms were full coverage and came complete with gas masks, while at their hips they carried what I guessed to be gas grenades.
I realised that this was likely part of an attempt to counter my powers so that they wouldn’t immediately get taken out by my swarm when rifles and normal combat gear wouldn’t be of any use against them, but it did incidentally also make them look like the most stereotypical evil minions I had ever seen. Especially since, while I wasn’t completely sure from what my bugs were telling me, I did get the impression that their uniforms were also black on top of everything else.
Grue, Foil and Parian were taking cover in an area completely blanketed by darkness, where the soldiers couldn’t aim into and the Yàngbǎn wouldn’t enter for fear of being rendered blind and powerless. Instead, the Yàngbǎn had formed two groups on the periphery of the black smoke Grue created, one working to send out their nullification waves to slowly push the darkness back and allow them to advance forward, while the other used their advanced senses to aim laser fire into the black void despite how they couldn’t see their targets.
Moving locations also allowed me to recuperate some of my lost swarm, and I wanted to make the most out of that.
A few insects were sent to attack the soldiers, mostly to annoy and distract them and test what their grenades did. Pulling one revealed that they did indeed release a thick, obscuring gas that was, at least to my bugs, very deadly. Pouncing on the opportunity, I sacrificed more to activate as many of their grenades as possible at once. Even if the gas masks filtered out the overwhelming amounts released, it should at the very least hurt their aim and waste their ammunition. Avoiding the Fairy Queen getting taken out by a lucky sniper shot from up high slipping past her defences seemed well worth the effort.
Another part of my swarm began harrying the Yàngbǎn like I had done the previous group; Cycling in with targeted attacks to force them to switch focus from taking down my friends while avoiding overcommitting and taking unnecessary insect casualties. They wouldn’t be able to take them down like this, but that wasn’t the point, I just needed to keep them occupied to give Grue and the others some respite and allow Glaistig Uaine to get to them.
That left me with a lot of remaining bugs to focus on my main objective: Finding and taking out Othello. He wasn’t an obvious powerhouse the way Citrine was but I still considered him the most dangerous enemy around here, and the one I was best suited for dealing with. The way I saw it, his power made him like a hybrid mix between Imp, Oni Lee and the Siberian in terms of how to approach him. His projection was both invisible and intangible, could see past Grue’s darkness and Imp’s perception filter and could still interact with the world when he wanted it to, including fighting. What’s worse, he could also switch so that his main body moved into the mirror dimension his projection normally inhabited while the projection became more substantial, so finding Othello himself wouldn’t be enough to end the fight.
Fortunately, one of the things my swarm was really good at was doing wide area searches and while I didn’t know how far his range was, my hope was that mine eclipsed his.
So I set to work scanning building after building for the man while I got closer to being able to personally participate. Glaistig Uaine was following me side by side, summoning another cadre of ghosts to help in the fight ahead, while Tattletale kept an eye on Citrine and made sure Ligeia got some medical attention. I wasn’t entirely happy with leaving her behind, but she was confident that she’d be safe and we were spread too thinly for me to have a lot of other options unless I wanted to leave Citrine completely unsupervised and just able to walk away if she wanted to.
I did give her a heads-up on all the traps I had found before I left though, because if I knew Tattletale she would want to snoop around in places like Accord’s old office while waiting and I’d rather she didn’t get incapacitated by a random trap she missed.
Team one were taking the opportunity to recover with the Yàngbǎn distracted. None of the three looked to be critically injured, but Grue was sporting a wound by the leg and Foil one on the side of her stomach.
I thought I could hear Grue saying “Thanks, Skitter.” But between this power drowning out sound and bug hearing being difficult to translate into human words I couldn’t be sure.
Parian was stitching up Foil, using her powers to aid in the effort by making the threads align themselves perfectly and weave together on their own. From their point of view, they were like under a spotlight, being near the edge of Grue’s darkness on the opposite side of the Yàngbǎn at the moment, with it slithering around them but light still shining down from above. From inside the darkness though, or on the other side of it, they were as obfuscated as anything else. It was kind of surreal to watch.
“More members of the Court of the Bleeding Lord have come to the usurper’s aid!” Glaistig Uaine cried out in joy at the sight of the Yàngbǎn. “How fun!”
Her enemies were decidedly less enthused about seeing her, already making a tactical withdrawal before she even unleashed motes of light to rain down upon them. Only a quick use of some form of stasis power saved them from all getting burned by the bombardment, but by stopping to use it they had allowed her to close the gap significantly.
“Witness True Royalty.” A spectral scythe tore through the hastily made forcefield thrown up to stop her. “I am the Keeper of the Dead, the Queen all Fairies shall return to, and by my command you will join a Court Unhallowed and Undying.”
I left her to enjoy herself, still focused on hunting down Othello. I didn’t think I was needed with the Yàngbǎn and the Fairy Queen seemed to like having all attention on her own performance. Her voice had gone back to reverberating on its own and she was even using a shade to levitate now for extra theatrical effect.
Grue gave me a nod upon seeing me stalk through the area he had cast into shadow to get closer without having to fight my way past enemies. He was almost done patching himself up, wrapping bandages around his leg.
“Orders?” I heard him say as though from a great distance.
“Stay back and cover the Fairy Queen.” I replied. “Don’t worry about blinding her, she can see Capes through most things as far as I can tell. Just try to cut people off from escaping or taking her out from afar.”
Another nod.
Othello found me before I found him, likely due to him already watching Grue and seeing me pass by him. A few of my closest lookout bugs sensed something ephemeral passing through them just before an invisible presence struck towards me with a knife as I exited the black smoke.
The split second forewarning proved just enough for me to turn it into no more than a glancing blow absorbed by my suit and I jumped back into the darkness.
He didn’t try to follow me. Interesting. Tracing him was difficult, especially when the projection could effectively disappear from this dimension, but I got the sense that he was still watching me, waiting for my next move. Could he not attack through Grue’s shadows? Perhaps he struggled to turn his projection semi-corporeal while inside them and that’s why he hadn’t been joining the Yàngbǎn in attacking team one while they took cover.
Experimentally, I started circling around the outer edges of the zone and I could feel Othello shifting to follow suit. Definitely not stopped from seeing me with his projection.
Unfortunately I still couldn’t find the real Othello, which probably meant that his range was longer than mine. I really wished that wasn’t the case, because it made beating him so much more complicated. In my experience it seemed to typically be a coin toss whether projection-type Masters could outrange me or not.
Now, if I was Othello and I wanted my real body to be safe from harm where would I be? The answer came almost immediately: On the other side of the Portal, with us having to breach the defences to reach him at all. It fit with how Jacklight had originally been part of defending it according to Grue but wasn’t to be found either from what I could tell, presumably he had fallen back to provide protection for Othello in case I went after him from a distance.
Another Yàngbǎn agent had fallen, swallowed by the rolling black fog and getting hunted down by the spectre of what I presumed to have once been a Case 53 from the monstrous shape and disproportionate limbs. Meanwhile, the toxic gas was billowing down from the upper floors of the Portal Tower, seeping through the windows broken by rifle fire and getting caught up by the wind from there. I couldn’t tell what the soldiers were up to any longer due to having to evacuate any local bugs from there.
What I wouldn’t give to be able to actually fly. Then I could just have breached through the broken windows and used the momentum to slip past the enemy to the Portal.
“New plan.” I whispered to Grue with the insects I had on him. Didn’t want Othello to catch on and he should still be able to hear me just fine even if the reverse wasn’t true. “I need to get to those gates. Follow me and cover me in darkness.”
He did so and I began making a run for it, hoping to catch the enemy by surprise before any of them realised what I was doing and had the time to react. Othello would still be able to see me, and the others might still guess what was going on from the surge of darkness in a specific direction, but I was counting on communication delays slowing down any response. I gathered my swarm close by as I rushed through the gap the Fairy Queen had made in the enemy lines.
A few people seemed to catch on what was happening, and a couple of mercenaries took potshots into the shadows covering me, but their aim was completely off and my only worry was that a bullet would hit me by sheer accident.
“Glaistig Uaine, could you please blow up the gates for me?” Another whisper from the bugs on the Fairy Queen.
“With pleasure.” She didn’t turn her head towards them, the ghost of the elongated monster flickering out of existence and being replaced by that of Purity, which took aim and fired without any input from its mistress.
I was standing close by when the blast hit the high gates and the explosion rocked the earth. I had been relying on Grue’s darkness to protect me from the worst of the shockwave with its general absorptive qualities and it largely worked, though I still felt unbalanced for half a second as I regained my bearings.
The guys on the other side had been less fortunate by the looks of it, for when I stepped out of the shadows and through the half-melted, broken gates, they were still dazed and recovering from what had just happened. Some of the gas from the upper floors had reached down to the bottom by the looks of it, but a lot of it had been pushed away when the doors flew open. Behind me, there was an ever growing buzz as more and more bugs streamed out of the darkness, their noise no longer covered by the void they had hidden in.
Another person would probably have managed to think of a cool one-liner as they stood by the doorframe while a tide of insects rolled past them, but I couldn’t for the life of me come up with something good to say. I just hoped that my silence would be taken as menacing and not awkward.
The shock factor seemed to be working though, for several people panicked and began firing wildly into the swarm as it engulfed them, their bullets hitting the occasional fly but doing nothing to stem the flow. Their suits protected them for a while but the material wasn’t enough to stop a dedicated attempt to bite through the weakest points for long. A few still had gas grenades left, those I put special focus on, having some flying insects get into their face to distract them while a few spiders and other critters worked to detach the grenades from their belts and let them roll away, where I covered them in bugs so that people wouldn’t spot them.
Othello lunged for me with his other self, but while the darkness didn’t seem to bother his vision, the chaos I had made still seemed to confuse him, for when I sidestepped the blow and created a decoy for him to go after, his next attack ended up being against the wrong me.
Grue had been slower than I was with his injured leg, but he was now also joining in taking down the mercenaries, while I slipped past them to head towards the Portal itself. The Tower’s counterpart on the side of Gimel was not nearly as fortified, due to us having no reason to fear an attack from that side, and as I got closer and got a good angle, I drew my pistol and fired through the Portal, breaking a bottom floor window and granting a point of entry for my other swarm. The one I had started gathering from the bugs of New Brockton as more and more of it fell into my range.
Suddenly, the Tower was being flooded from both within and without as more bugs joined the fray. I ran through the gateway to Gimel, leapt across the now broken window out into New Brockton and found him.
—
As I suspected, Othello was hiding with Jacklight inside the bunker complex beneath the colony. Inside the room where they had taken cover there were several pieces of machinery, some of which I remembered from having spied being smuggled into the city. None of them were helpfully labeled but they certainly looked important, be their purpose bomb or something else.
Much like Accord’s headquarters, they had clearly gone to great lengths to cleanse the hidden bunkers off bugs, and the sealed doors didn’t grant a lot of points of entry. The occasional insect that had slipped the net wouldn’t be enough to do this on their own and Accord would have had to be monumentally stupid to have forgotten to change the keys and passwords required to get inside.
While trying to think of a solution, I still had to deal with Othello’s invisible doppelganger chasing after me. When it became solid enough to try to stab me I still could hardly see it and even the cloud of bugs I used to warn of his coming were struggling to sense his presence. Worse, it could become effectively undetectable at the cost of being unable to strike me just to try and catch me further by surprise. I had to be constantly on the move and act unpredictably to avoid getting hit, and the effort spent doing that made it hard to also think of what to make of the next step of my spur of the moment plan.
Worst case scenario I could just continue to keep them distracted and occupied while Glaistig Uaine won the rest of the battle for us before she could take down the doors on her own, but that felt extremely unsatisfying and I wanted to feel like I had been an active contributor to defeating our foes.
The worms and other burrowing creatures of the earth were testing to see if there was some sort of weakness, a point of entry where the cement hadn’t been laid yet and they could get through. They found three in an unfinished section of the underground complex, where excavation and construction was still underway. That at least gave me something, but the problem from there was that there was little intersection between the category of bugs capable of burrowing through the earth and the one capable of in any way attacking a human being. I still started bringing them in and sent as many as I could to, painfully slowly, make their way towards the nearest entrance door.
Meanwhile, the Fairy Queen had killed her fourth Yàngbǎn, Grue was blanketing the entire Portal Tower in darkness and together with my bugs picking the mercenaries off one by one as they couldn’t fire without risking hitting their own. Othello was still attacking me, and I was now sporting two more bruises from glancing stabs. Comms with the others were getting unreliable now that I was on the other side of the portal and there was only a narrow point of entry for any signal to get through but Regent wasn’t reporting trouble so far. Parian and Foil had rejoined the battle, the former having hastily made a few puppets that could act as distractions if not combatants and the latter no longer bleeding from her wound to the side.
After two more minutes of me just running around, leading Othello on a chase to keep him occupied now that Grue’s darkness was blocking his way to the rest of the fight, I had finally brought enough ants, worms, spiders and woodlice to the exit door to get them to unlock it from the inside. By then I was pretty close and ready to get inside and finish this. I sidestepped the traps, which were more obvious than the previous ones due to Accord not having had the chance to build them into the foundations yet and the faster bugs I had checking while waiting for the slower ones to get to the door.
“She’s here.” Othello informed Jacklight, having roused himself from his state of deep concentration. “Get ready.”
“Seriously?” Jacklight began making globes of light, ready to be unleashed if I or my swarm made our way through the doorway to their room. When I tried to send a smaller group to see what would happen he made one of the globes hover under the doorframe, where it incinerated anything that tried to pass through.
By the time that orb had flickered out he already had several more at the ready, so I couldn’t just bait him to spend them all. I leaned against the wall, noting that Othello’s doppelganger was no longer chasing after me. Perhaps he was trusting Jacklight to handle me, or perhaps he just wanted to put some distance between it and me in case he needed to switch places with it.
“Alright, Skitter, you have us cornered, but you’re not getting through this place.” Jacklight said loudly. “Now if you’re as smart and well informed as you appear to be, you should know that some of the stuff in here is pretty dangerous, so let’s negotiate. Accord said that-”
“Wait. Look out, their-” Othello did not get any further before someone shoved him towards Jacklight, breaking his own concentration and distracting the latter.
I used the brief second while their focus was broken and their attention turned towards this unseen threat to run into the room, swarm following close behind, and getting too up close and personal to Jacklight for him to be able to use his power without risking friendly fire. He stumbled backwards to avoid getting hit by my baton and was quickly covered in bugs, his desperate attempts to get them to stop biting him by activating another orb to freeze them into place only ending up causing him to also get frozen by the bubble of non-motion created.
Othello disappeared from existence like he’d just teleported away, but if I hadn’t been misinformed about his power he had just entered into his own mirror dimension, rendering him safe from harm but also forcing his doppelganger to fully materialise into our world, and thus be rendered vulnerable.
True enough, my flying scouts soon found it fleeing the scene, and I dispatched a portion of my minions to attack. The feeling as they bit into what had been able to attack me without retaliation for so long was quite satisfying, though it didn’t taste quite like human flesh normally did, still being just a copy of the real deal.
I waited until Othello was forced to trade places again due to the sensory feedback from his doppelganger and found him making his way towards the exit. He didn’t get far before I caught up to him, doubled over as he was from the painful feeling of having his clone be eaten alive. He turned around and found my pistol aimed straight at his face.
Slowly, and with as much dignity as he could muster, Othello raised his arms into the air. “I surrender. Accord wants to speak with you.”
Before I could respond, a very familiar looking figure wearing a demonic mask and still bleeding from her injury earlier in the fight appeared right next to him and punched him in the stomach so hard he doubled over.
“And that’s what you get for stabbing me, you bitch.” Imp kicked him too for good measure. “Now who’s the biggest baddest Stranger?”
“You should get that looked into.” I noted. “Don’t want you bleeding out and falling unconscious with none of us able to find you.”
“Fuck, right. Yeah.” She looked down at her injury. “Just wanted some payback first and figured if I stalked you I’d get it.”