Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

The first time I felt a pinprick of something invisible bouncing off my defenses during the monster fight it was sufficiently distracting that I got slammed into a hillside five miles away from a pair of tentacles. It was like being in a boxing match for the title and suddenly feeling a pin tapping at your back. I frowned, didn't see anywhere the faint attack could be coming from, then used the five mile long acceleration run to ram in the base of those tentacles and sever them while carving up the rest with my Eyebeams.

The second time I felt it was while trying to see if different methods of tearing the kaiju's tentacles or the number of different wounds would have an impact on its regeneration speed. Neither did; in fact the monster seemed capable of healing all of its wounds at the same speed as a single wound, no matter how many wounds added up. That was odd to say the least. Regeneration abilities shouldn't work like that, not unless they were specifically designed to scale but at the kaiju's sheer size you'd need an immensely powerful ability to conjure all its missing mass. Just as odd was that phantom pinprick getting back stronger or rather... feeling like two pinpricks?

Our battle had slowly pushed the monster further and further from the force bubble where the civilians and the few soldiers guarding them were as time passed. It was a deliberate tactic on my part, one the tentacled horror was willing to accommodate as long as I kept engaging it in a fight. By now, I was pretty certain its creator had to be controlling the thing from some remote location, yet no signals my Force Awareness could detect came anywhere near it. That did not mean they did not exist, merely that they did not use methods my own senses could pick up. For all I knew the creator communicated with the tentacled freak through psychic powers or communication spells, neither of which my force-based abilities could detect.

That made sense. If the designer had been using conventional communications someone would have picked his location up by now. There had been other kaiju attacks, after all. I flew a circle around the monster, scanning it from all sides. The tentacles tried to snare me several times but I blinked among them, changing trajectory with rapid uses of Spatial Leap. Teleportation wasn't something I used often in my fights after my return, but that was because most opponents in this time could be easily overpowered without proper tactics. The thousand-foot-tall behemoth was tough enough that I couldn't just splatter it, on top of wanting to find its link to its master. Because the killing monster wasn't the goal here; finding the monster-maker before he could make a bigger, uglier monster was.

The pinpricks returned as I flew around the monster, a hair stronger and more numerous than before. Tracking their origin wasn't easy, with the kaiju being an aggressive specimen that refused to stay still on the proverbial examination table, but I persevered. I also tore off several tentacles until one of the pinpricks... winked out? Zeroing in on the last bit of torn-off flesh I found something that did not really fit the mountain of misshapen muscle that was my enemy. There, at the base of the torn-off, subway-train-sized tentacle was a human eyeball. Flying between attacking limbs of similar size, I picked the one with the eyeball up and carried it away from the kaiju's immediate reach. Then I narrowed my perception to the one feature that did not fit and scanned it with my senses.

The monster's internal structure was very much unlike both Earth animals and the monsters that came in during the Invasion. For one thing, its tissues were simplistic. It didn't really have different cells, not as such. Sure, there were some cellular structures in that organic sludge it was mostly made of, or approximations thereof, but no nuclei, no outer membranes, no infinitely complex network of perfect symbiosis making up a greater whole. It was as if someone had taken the bare minimum they needed from biological sources, rebuilt it on a grand scale and called it a day. It should not have worked - wouldn't have, except for the addition of magic. The same animating spells that provided locomotion to the undead were woven throughout the monster's structure. Fused in its mass in the same way they would have been applied to corpses, they provided a mockery of life without needing the kaiju to be a living organism. Curiously, it was not a single massive animation spell doing this, but countless individual ones woven into the monster's fake muscle strands. Then there were the cybernetics.

The kaiju roared its complaint that I was not giving it my undivided attention, then the pinpricks on my back multiplied. I momentarily ignored both distractions as I studied the cybernetic additions to the sample I'd extracted. At first glance, they looked metallic; thousands of strands of metal circuitry woven through the monster's musculature as a form of diffuse endoskeleton providing both mechanical support and whatever technological functions the designer wanted that biologic and magic alone could not provide. But on closer inspection they were revealed not as metal but structures of organometallic composite with similarities to limpet teeth. At such enormous scale and with more wire-like configuration they became flexible while remaining several times tougher than steel... before the magical reinforcement. Because they were effectively a form of bone, the same spells that gave various undead their great durability compared to the human corpses they originated from could be applied here, to proportional results. Yet because they were also organic, the monster' regeneration worked on them just fine.

Someone was being too clever for their own good, mixing biotechnology, necromancy and outright powers, but how was all that linked to the human eye growing out of the monster's skin? One of the thinner wires extended up to the monster's skin, like a grotesque mimicry of both blood vessels and nerves. There it delivered an organic fluid out of which the eye had grown... and that fluid contained human cells suspended in some thick nutrient paste. Then the wire delivered nutrients and oxygen to that human eye, essentially growing the very human organ on top of the kaiju's entirely different internal structure. A human eye that emitted power entirely different than the monster's animation spells or its regeneration.

Shit.

I turned back to the kaiju and the sources of the now two dozen pinpricks I'd been feeling during my two or three seconds of superspeed investigation. More human eyes growing from random spots on the kaiju's skin, each generating its own weak offensive power. Given what I'd seen of the tentacled atrocity's internal structure, it was theoretically capable of growing a few eyes per square yard of skin. If even a small percentage of that potential was realized, it would mean not dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of eyes but several tens of thousands...

xxxx

Mark, Gabby and Cindy had been following the original power and water lines deeper into the crater for some time now. The mist had been thinning out for the last mile of their cautious advance, replaced by an eerie green illumination with no apparent source. The slime under their feet had thickened into a layer more akin to muddy soil just solid enough to support their weight. Testing with one of Gabby's swords had revealed it was several feet thick at this point and steadily growing thicker the deeper they went into the crater. They were already nearly five miles in, with only two miles to go to the crater's center, but the thickening of the slime had slowed them down. Not because its stickiness in any way impeded the teenage superhumans beyond its ickiness factor, but because of what it could be hiding. Mark was of the opinion that more enemies would be hiding under it, ready to ambush them as they advanced on the enemy stronghold. It was what made tactical sense and it was very much possible. Gabby on the other hand argued that the slime itself would animate and swallow them when it best fit its alien master's plans. Forget about humanoid enemies, how do you fight when the alien environment itself is the attacker? Understandably, none of the three was in any hurry to get even deeper into the alien growth.

"Ew," Cindy exclaimed, the girl's jade eyes flickering between several different places ahead that the boys could not yet see.

"Barnes, why did you stop?" Mark demanded somewhat impatiently but with far less hostility than before. Zombie movies might show survivors often fight each other for petty reasons, but the dark skinned boy had found nothing bound people together more than saving each other's lives. He might still hate the girl for all the bullshit she'd pulled and would probably continue to pull back at base but when standing with her against undead horrors he trusted her to have his back. Or at least, he amended in his mind, he trusted that she wanted to kill the smelly, ugly, slimy and generally disgusting things a hell of a lot more than she liked to mess with him.

"Because both you and Gabe were both wrong," she said, her face scrunching up in disgust. "And it is worse. So, so much worse." She sighed, looked around, then scowled. "Screw this slime covering everything. There isn't even a place for us to sit." There was a crackle of magical energy at her complaint then a wide, floating sword appeared by her side, complete with sheath. She smiled and hopped upon it. "Thanks Gabe, you're a lifesaver," she said, tossing her long hair over her shoulder and winking at the other boy. "Or at least a pants saver, that green sludge is disgusting."

Aaand... they were back to fooling around. The sword-wielder's face went so dark it was almost black and had they been under a more normal light Mark was sure he'd look like a beetroot. But at least it was far friendlier than all the so-called pranks she'd pulled back at base, let alone the actual attacks when she got angry. From the way that Gabe blushed and averted his eyes he might even enjoy the attention of the pretty brunette. Mark on the other hand would leave his teammate to his delusions and quietly distance himself from the borderline crazy girl that was her own army.

"You still have not explained why we stopped," he very neutrally asked instead.

"Because we'd rather heal up before the next fight and trust me, from what I'm seeing there will be a next fight." Flickering instances of her spread out in the surrounding area, half-glimpsed images of what the boys knew was a far more numerous force. "You two are still healing, right?" In both their opinion, Cindy's ability to make her other selves effectively undetectable when she tried was the scariest bit about her power but... was it a trick of this alien environment or were the flickers more numerous than usual?

"I... I'm still healing, yeah," Gabe admitted, opening and closing his fists as he examined his until recently broken arms. "It's s-slower now but I still feel... the power? Yeah, the power working to fix them." Of the three of them, he'd had the most broken bones as three hulking undead had basically treated him like a sandbag during the earlier fight.

"I'm mostly fine, I think," Mark lied, which only got him an eye roll from the girl. Yeah, sure, he wasn't a hundred percent after his own explosions had done a number on them but he would be. He could feel the power Gabe mentioned working to return him to tip-top shape from dozens of deep flesh wounds and organ damage from the blast wave he'd taken point-blank. People got it wrong; flesh wounds might not hurt as much as broken bones, but muscle actually healed slower than bone and for normal people always imperfectly.

Barnes... no, Cindy had done them a huge favor letting them kill those crippled hulking zombies earlier. Both he and Gabe had been wounded enough to be useless for days and the power boost from the kills had not only fixed it but maybe made them a bit stronger too. Cindy had been in just as bad condition and yet had still thought of them instead of claiming more kills for herself. That was the primary reason Mark was reconsidering... some parts of his interaction with the girl.

"Great!" she chirped, annoyingly. "So when the army of zombies attacks, you'll be fully ready to fight, yes?"

"What army of zombies?" Mark demanded, several mimicked weapons systems jumping to the forefront of his mind as hie instinctively reached for the biggest stick he could find. No! That's how he got wounded before. He needed a measured response, one tailored to the situation. And he needed to be able to think of one on the fly, for when his first plan did not survive on contact with the enemy.

"There really is an army of zombies out there?" Gabby asked her more... politely than Mark's own demand. He'd soon learn that the leopard did not change her stripes, she was just biding her time. Or maybe Mark was too cynical and the girl was finally shaping up... nope. He could not even think it with a straight face.

"You'll both see it soon enough, I'm trying not to right now." She was actually sitting on the floating sword with her eyes closed. "It really is that ugly." She leaned back, lying upon the sword while her limbs dangled limply off the sides. "Gabby, could you make me another dagger? Something small that can be easily concealed yet can cut through durability?"

"I can try," the other boy replied, a bit uncertain. Mark remembered how his most powerful swords had always been the largest. "But first... I think... yes!" The world seemed to twist upon itself until a new floating sword faded into existence, this one over fifteen feet long and glowing green. Immediately Mark felt the lingering aches in his slowly healing wounds subsiding, his recovery greatly boosted. Cindy had noticed too, and immediately got up to examine the new artifact closer.

"You can make a healing sword?" she asked in awe. "Why aren't you touring hospitals, or something?"

"B-because it boosts everything?" Gabe responded with his usual awkwardness. "The Warden said it would be like cancer to normals. I've been trying to fix that but no dice." His face hung as if his inability to turn an already magical healing into a proper miracle on demand was some sort of huge failure. Mark always thought Gabe had inadequacy issues. Maybe growing more powerful would fix it?

"It's great!" Cindy actually encouraged the boy and Mark had to do a double take. This was still Cindy, right? He tried to find some way his powers could check for doppelgangers or possession but came up empty. Eh, she'd either turn on them or she wouldn't. The only confusing bit was which a real Cindy would choose.

They sat around to catch their breath from the earlier battles and try to get some better coordination between the three of them, yet Mark felt a rising urgency as if their time was running out. He wanted to suggest that they charge ahead immediately but he could already see the other two would not listen... and both he and Gabe needed to heal. Maybe he was wrong, maybe he wasn't.

And he was not ready to find out.

xxxx

A thousand eyes sent out invisible attacks that felt like tiny needles against skin along with wordless accusations. "Why didn't you save us?" they seemed to say. "Why weren't you there?" The artificially induced guilt was beginning to get on my nerves. All the eyes were near-identical, implying a single DNA source being somehow replicated. Some CIA agent with this kind of power must have been among the vanished team we'd been sent to find, got himself killed, then his power was somehow replicated in the kaiju. Problem was, powers were not genetic. They propagated through ideas, memetics, not biology. To Maya's understanding, they shouldn't be copy-able like that. If they had been, the invaders wouldn't have needed mass sacrifices in the hundreds of thousands and an intentionally dragged-out battle to spread their undead and demons across Florida. Power seemed to be coming out of thin air here.

I flew a loop around a grasping tentacle, then teleported away from a giant grapnel that crackled with lightning. Those things gave a nasty shock even to someone with my durability and I didn't want to underestimate my opponent again before I understood how it worked. The more I looked at the kaiju, the more certain I became it had been engineered with a specific target in mind, namely me. Despite being slower, it could somehow keep up with my high-speed flight, its tentacles often appearing in my path out of nowhere. It could also regenerate from any gross physical harm, its healing scaling with the damage I could deal, and it was tough enough and large enough that to kill it in one blow would have unfortunate geographical ramifications - the type that included the redrawing of maps. It could also do some weird remote attack through the eyes it grew, whose number increased as the fight went on. All in all something that could, theoretically, take me out... but not kill me. In fact, however violent its attacks might be to most, to me they would be non-lethal.

Someone had a big idea of themselves, if they intentionally aimed to capture me.

I flew around the monster faster than it could turn its torso but the sensation of pins and needles did not abate. It had grown eyes all around its body now, so no matter which direction I attacked from it could keep sending me those baleful gazes, complete with stabs of psychic force. Were they actually psychic? Who knew? My Force Awareness did not register the gazes as natural forces, in fact did not register them at all. My defenses on the other hand did register and oppose the harmful forces, though that might have been long and repeated use slowly expanding the effect of those skills. It was unclear, especially since my costume had not suddenly gotten any new holes added to it. It was worrying not to know, to doubt my own senses, to be unclear on whether my tactics and abilities functioned properly. Maybe I should pull back and...

Yeah, no. This was just further evidence of psychic attack. Filling the enemy with self-doubt was a good way to cripple their decision-making mid-fight. Unfortunately for the would-be tentacled kidnapper, minor powers hardly affected me through the cover of Immutable Force, even the combined weight of thousands of them. As more and more eyes formed on the kaiju they became annoying, maybe a bit distracting, but nothing truly serious.

Using Spatial and Chronal Leap interchangeably, I plotted a convoluted force around the monster. Shifting my trajectory with teleportation rather than having to turn around physically enabled me to keep accelerating in a straight line without needing the space to do so. I went faster and faster and faster until even my reflexes barely let me teleport between tentacles as I now moved faster than the fastest shooting stars. Then one final teleportation and I rammed into the kaiju from below at over sixty miles per second.

The impact was tremendous especially when amplified with my powers. The entire million-ton bulk of the enemy rose into the sky even as my body drilled into the central mass ten feet, twenty, thirty, until I got tangled in foot-thick strands of extremely tough material and came to a stop. Then what felt like a massive electric current grounded itself through my body. Force Adjustment partially deflected it but a lot less than it should have against a normal- oh, it was a power. The metaphysical weight of the kaiju slammed against my own even as the kaiju's physical form crashed back into the ground. I won the clash, but the difference was much less than I felt comfortable with and instead of reducing the attack by a factor of twenty, my defenses only adjusted it by a factor of five. It hurt more like a taser than something lethal but I was forced to pull back instead of trying to drill through the monster's core and destroy it from within.

The moment I got into the air once more, a grapnel tentacle almost caught me. Burning through it with Eyebeams, I reconsidered my tactics. My initial plan of holding back and trying to find the kaiju's controller was not working. The monster had stopped growing eyes and was somehow relocating its tentacles in fractions of a second in an attempt to catch me, meaning it was activating another power. Regeneration, power resistance, electricity, baleful eyes, warping tentacles, that made five on top of its physical enhancements. Could I afford it to activate more in an attempt to catch its master?

I pulled back and activated Eyebeams again. Instead of a single-point attack like before, the beams struck in one place, then arced out to strike in another, and another, and another. There was a limited amount of volume they could affect, especially with the monster's resistance, but human eyes were tiny things. In moments, I had disintegrated more than a thousand spots on the monster's surface, robbing it of its line-of-sight weapons. Suddenly I flew straighter, thought faster, even breathed easier. It was as if an unseen weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Had the eyes been affecting me without me noticing? In retrospect, Empowering Regeneration should have given me more of a boost during the fight, especially after getting tasered by the monster's insides. The difference was easy to miss as it had been gradual, but the five percent change it felt like was small yet significant.

Scowling, I flew through the grasping tentacles without holding back even as I prepared another trump card to use just in case. This time I did not stop at severing one tentacle or two or three; I kept ripping them apart instead of dodging while the kaiju roared in pain. Why had it been designed to feel pain? It made no sense in a weapon. Not that it mattered to me as I trimmed it down to size. In one last, desperate attack, a grapnel snapped shut around my waist then flooded my body with that electrical power. In response I grabbed the beak-like protrusions and shattered them, leaving the kaiju with a mere dozen tentacles and only a third of them grapnels, twice as many already torn apart. It was time to end this.

The monster's controller must have been thinking that, too because the humongous blob opened tens of thousands of glowing eyes. The effect struck me like a kick to the solar plexus, followed my the realization it had never stopped growing new eyes. It had just been keeping them closed, hidden until there were enough of them to make a difference while the monster's power resistance blocked my senses enough I would not notice unless I specifically looked. And I hadn't.

In my momentary distraction, the four remaining grapnel-tentacles caught on to my limbs and delivered all the lightning power the kaiju could produce...

xxxx

Gabby walked through the twisted alien field, barely holding his breakfast in. The plant-zombies had been disgusting in a more clinical way, that of dead bodies and unhealthy growth. The brutes had been scary in a physical way; they could hurt them, kill them, even cause pain for fun like the worst bullies Gabby had ever known. The slime had just had the ickiness of wading through green alien snot and the mist and gloom invoked the fear of the unknown, but this?

The mist had retreated, forming a ceiling of clouds a hundred feet above their head that dripped green slime at a steady rate. Below it, a vast expanse of strangely mutated plants stretched out ahead of the three teenage superheroes, dwarf trees that had short, dancing tentacles instead of leaves. Golden and silver blossoms grew from them, glowing like countless lightbulbs against the greenery that stretched as far as the eye could see. A plantation of many square miles hidden inside a crater in one of the most remote and inhospitable places on Earth, behind magic that had concealed it from view until they had both gotten close enough and fought their first battle in Devon Island. If Mark had not upset that flowerbed where they first landed would they have ever found this place?

But that was not the horrible bit; what made Gabby either flee and not look back or blow this place up with extreme prejudice were the people. The smallest trees were near the edges of the field, barely the size of a typical kiosk. From their trunks and boughs bulged huge, transparent gourds the size of a fridge, filled with yellowish, pus-like fluid. Floating naked in that fluid and dead to the world was a toddler of two or three years old, their entire head wrapped up in a flesh-like mask of plant matter connected to the roof of the gourd and the tree beyond with a green umbilical. Some of the smaller-looking trees held newborns instead of toddlers, while in the row behind were slightly larger trees holding kids from five to fifteen. And the fully-grown trees covering most of the fields? Those held adult men and women, not asleep but writhing helplessly, blindly trying to escape. And that was not all.

Further in the trio saw the gourds of a tree being cut open by a dozen plant-zombies. The people were released from their prisons, the face-hugging tentacles removed... only for them to start gasping and writhing in the ground even worse than before. Before either Mark or Gabby could react, Cindy was already there, cutting down every single zombie to bits and then trying to help. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with the people apart from their being naked except one by one their struggles weakened rapidly till they died. During the whole couple of minutes none of them had made a single sound.

Cindy blinked towards a gourd, ready to cut it open with the new dagger Gabby had made for her but Mark stood in the way.

"It's no use," the other boy said in such a dull tone and with such a lack of expression Gabby thought he might have fallen into shock. "There's nothing we could do to help here."

"Explain," Cindy demanded, the air around her buzzing from how fast her body was flickering. "Right now."

"They can't breathe," Mark pointed out what the two of them had not noticed. "These... growing pods are sealed and the face masks don't actually provide air. All these people, they're grown by magic, obviously meant to die. Remember what Wennefer said about sacrifices and magic?" The other boy kicked one of the zombies, hard. "They want to turn them into zombies anyway. Why would they give them the ability to breathe when not doing so ensures there is no possibility of escape and no need for extra work to kill them before the conversion?"

"That's monstrous," the girl glowered. She was actually shaking, in rage or horror Gabby could not tell. Her eyes... if that murderous stare had been directed at him Gabby would have started running and not stopped until he had at least an ocean between him and its source.

"We are fighting monsters, yes?" Mark replied in that same dead tone. "Every police officer, firefighter, doctor and rescue worker knows you can't save everyone. Every soldier knows that often all you can do is efficiently dispatch the target before it can do worse."

"Sure, let's go bag us some monsters," Cindy agreed with a half-crazy cackle. They went.

While they marched in silence and the other two kept a lookout for enemies, i.e. looked everywhere but the trees and their... fruit, Gabby checked out a growing suspicion of his via some napkin math. A tree every thirty feet or so, grounds four miles across, minus the roads, multiply by one to two dozen gourds per tree...

"Guys," Gabby spoke, the urge to flee making both his hands and his swords shake. "I don't-" he gulped, looked around frantically. "I don't think we killed nearly enough zombies."

"What do you mean?" Mark asked with a frown. "We killed thousands."

"Yeah, but there must be three hundred thousand of those trees here." Both of his teammates stopped dead at that number. So many. That number terrified Gabby, and not just at the prospect of a tide of zombies. Four to five million people, the population of an entire freaking city, doomed to die. What would the bad guys do with that many sacrifices? What could they do? Ruin another whole state perhaps?

"Maybe... the plantation is new," Mark hypothesized slowly. "Maybe the trees are only now reaching maturity."

"Yeah," Cindy added, her body flickering even more wildly. "Maybe we are lucky, for once."

They weren't lucky.

First by ones and twos, then by dozens, then by larger groups the same basic plant zombies they had fought earlier approached them through the trees. Gabby quickly started forming the largest and thus most powerful sword he had ever made before, the imitation of Caladbolg of legend that could split the tops off three hills with one swing. His version might not be nearly as powerful, at most capable of splitting a single hill, but it should do something, right?

Mark was already firing, a storm of bullets every single one of which exploded with building-flattening force on impact. He walked his fire over the largest groups approaching, hitting them with enough firepower to level a small town every second. It was an impressive show of force, devastating to both zombies and trees where it landed, throwing their shattered remains all over the area... but it could not be everywhere. The zombies moved fast, faster than their fictional counterparts in any Hollywood movie and there was an endless sea of them. Neither the blasts themselves nor the burning, napalm-filled craters they left in the fields could hold back the tide... but they could slow it.

Thousands of zombies came close to the trio of teens... where their advance stumbled upon a line of thousands of Cindies. The girl was throwing out a storm of magical blades, flickering copies of the one he'd made for her while her original stood next to Gabby, dagger in hand. The blade was not meant to be used that way but Gabby would never tell her. She looked... fierce. Unfortunately, even with her efforts adding to the slaughter the zombies were still advancing, climbing over mountains of the dead or wading through napalm in their efforts to reach them.

Then Gabby's sword finally finished, a floating blade as long and wide as two city buses from end to end. He'd tried to make it smaller, but it had been a compromise between unwieldy size and rapid manifestation. Wielding almost the entirety of his power in a single weapon, he swung. A teeming mass of zombies almost the size of a city block were instantly reduced to paste, the energy of their slaughter pouring into Gabby like a stream. So he did it again and again and again, annihilating thousands of square yards' worth of the endless horde with every blow.

The enemy lines staggered, the combined efforts of all three teenage superhumans managing to hold back the tide for a time. One minute, maybe two, they took on the legions of Hell and came out ahead. Then the bad guys sent more than just their basic infantry.

Mark was the first to be targeted. Brutes showed up in the distance by the hundreds, throwing rocks, bone spears, still flaming, blown-up pieces of trees, even other zombies with such force that the barrage reached the flying boy as quickly as arrows could have - real arrows, not the slow ones used in most movies so audiences could see what was going on. He dodged again and again, his return-fire blowing up the Brutes where they stood, but in the end there were too many of them. He was clipped once, twice, then a rock the size of a washing machine smashed into his chest at maybe a couple hundred miles an hour. He was knocked from the sky not dead or even seriously wounded, but when he landed in a throng of zombies far from Gabby or Mandy he was quickly overwhelmed.

Gabby tried to do something, anything to help, but his enormous sword was good for annihilating huge numbers. It was far worse at sparing a single specific person out of said numbers. He sliced at the edges of the horde Mark had dropped into, killing the majority of them but in the end he saw a bloody, unconscious Mark being carried away.

"Gabe!" Cindy yelled for his attention and when he took his eyes off Mark he saw she was being quickly overwhelmed, the lines of her flickering copies being pushed back as many of them disappeared under a tide of dead flesh. Gabe guessed that no matter how many copies she made, how many times she tried, it was pretty hard to dodge attacks if there was no empty space for her to dodge to.

He brought his giant sword around, pushed himself to create several smaller dancing swords from the power gained from recent kills but with only him and Cindy they could only slow the horde down, not completely stop it. They were probably going to die here, weren't they? Well, if they were to die then he had one final fuck-you to give those bastards. He poured more energy into his giant sword and the multi-ton blade started to vibrate and crackle with energy as its material... changed. He'd asked Teach about this and knew it was possible. All he needed was to do it quickly enough.

"They are not trying to kill us," a rather exhausted Cindy said by his side. "I think they're trying to capture us." She was twitching less now and panting as if she'd run a marathon, her catsuit entirely drenched in her own sweat but untouched by just about anything else.

"Can you get away?" he asked her seriously. He had no idea how long he could stand on his own before he'd have to trigger his final trick but...

"No," she shook her head tiredly. "Maybe if I was fresh or they had fewer brutes but with both at once..."

"What happened to being untouchable?!" Gabby demanded.

"Maybe I grew less suicidally overconfident," she shot back even as her lines of copies flickered and vanished. "Now don't try anything stupid and kill us all, OK?" As the zombies swarmed them, Gabby cursed and threw his giant sword away with as much force as his powers allowed. Seconds later, the two of them fell under the grasping, choking, punching tide.

A few more seconds after that, Gabby's giant sword partially turned to plutonium and detonated. His powers weren't fast enough to turn more than a few pounds of the multi-ton mass into the highly unstable metal before the chain reaction blew it up but the explosion was still comparable to several thousand tons of TNT. It blew an entire square mile of the horrendous plantation to bits and formed a small mushroom cloud over the smoke.

Gabby's last thought before unconsciousness took him was the hope that the explosion would be seen and help would come soon.