My eyes were on the troopers. They weren’t in air-sealed armor, so they were dying and going up like disintegrating torches like everyone else. One of them was trying to hit something on his gauntlet, so I shot him and sent him flying, interrupting the motion all the Red Eyes were focused on, while a hot flow of ash on warm air blew past us, carrying poison and death with it.

The Red Eyes were suddenly and very urgently looking in all directions.

“Mr. Hill! There’s some sort of self-destruct going off!” I called into my coms, hoping he heard it, while I pushed off the ceiling, twisting to land on my feet, and booked out the way we’d come in. “It’s coming from above!”

---

The Mountain looked at the flickering holo display flashing something in the alien language, and the pulped aliens around. The burst of sound from his collar-com matched his expectations.

They had something on overwatch. A satellite, disguised among the others, or a cloaked ship? He didn’t know what, only that once it was revealed, it was likely going to be destroyed really fast.

He tore the head off the Skrull in the fanciest purple outfit and looked at the ceiling.

Time to find out how much repulsion power I got, he thought, and his power condensed down to his right leg, and like drawing a bow, built up strength.

---

I was both running with superhuman speed and power, and Repulsing myself forwards from the ground, repelling the air in front of me for no wind resistance and massive air pressure driving me forward from behind.

The Red Eyes were all staring up at the sky as I booked at all the speed I could muster, prepped to Linejump if I couldn’t make it in time, but in the meantime racing the seconds as the danger built and built...

The red beam from On High came down right on the center of the town, obliterating the command center, and rapidly expanded out from there. As it did, its power was diluted quickly, just wiping the surface clean of everything living, glassing the entire town rapidly as it expended its power.

But it wasn’t a big town, only a mile across, which meant I only needed like ten seconds to get out of the place.

The purging blast faded away a hundred paces behind my heels, and I sighed as the threat level faded and the Red Eyes went away.

A heavy smoking figure came down from the sky a couple hundred yards in front of me as I stood up and we just coasted along above the asphalt on Repulse, letting wind resistance slow Lania and I down. I turned around as I coasted, and Lania lifted her head to look back at what was left of her town.

It was basically black and shiny, with little clumps here and there where metal things hadn’t melted completely down. The heat had been so intense that there wasn’t even any smoke, everything just cooked and fused before any air could waft it up and away.

I looked up expectantly, and five seconds later, high in the sky, a firebird blew across the heavens, totally visible even from this distance, and any lingering danger evaporated.

The streak coming down from high in the sky, leaving a big long vapor trail, was only visible after the source had already arrived.

My gliding coast drifted up next to Mr. Hill, who definitely looked partially cooked, his trench coat blackened and tattered around the edges, his short hair scorched, and a reddened hue to his face and hands.

“Been a while since I been hit by something that hot,” he grumbled to me, eyes fixed on the figure floating above the middle of the blast zone, white cape floating over the crimson bodysuit that everybody on the planet recognized.

“Primus...” Lania breathed, staring with the rest of us. I slowly let her down, supporting her as she stood on her own feet.

Another golden streak came down from above, a great golden wall of light over a mile wide sweeping across in a scan, crossing us as the Lantern searched for survivors.

There was a blur of motion, and Primus was abruptly floating six inches off the ground directly in front of us.

He didn’t throw off the vibes of power he probably could, but the speed itself was a huge warning to anyone with any brains. The red and white bodysuit, the single red star inside the diamond, was known by anyone who had any knowledge of Powered at all.

He was a perfectly proportioned human specimen: tall, the athletic compromise between strength and tone, handsome without being blindingly so, with a precisely cut beard and mustache of his dark hair. Blue eyes looked us over, noting everything as his gaze played over all of us, fixing on Lania intently.

I nudged her. “Close your Killzone.”

She jerked, startled. “Oh, right.” She closed her eyes and concentrated, biting her lip nervously. I reached over and traced the meridian to give her focus, and after a very tense fifteen seconds, the yellow-white light of her mind dagger extended out her hand, and she clutched it as she exhaled shakily.

His dark blue eyes softened somewhat after he saw the color of her mindblade, and flicked past me to The Mountain.

“Hill,” he stated, only the faintest traces of his Russian accent in the word.

“Primus,” The Mountain said calmly, pulling out a cigar from inside his coat, igniting it against his cooling skin as he held up his other hand. “Skrulls,” he said, holding up the head, only a little charred, that he still grasped in his off hand, its green flesh sizzling at the touch of his skin.

The Lantern came swooping in, the crystalline, eye-like orb ‘lantern’ that gave the red-skinned alien his power close at hand. He was obviously covering for Primus, although the most powerful superhero on the planet didn’t need help to deal with The Mountain.

Primus locked eyes on the Skrull’s head, the blue glowing for a second. He turned his head just a fraction, and the head floated out of Mr. Hill’s grasp up to the Lantern, who glided down behind and above Primus, his lantern’s golden light playing across it.

“A Skrull commander, by his gene mods,” the Lantern confirmed calmly. The light swept across all of us, doing a deep scan. “Powered, all of them.”

“Over there are some upended cars blocking the road. In the glove compartment of one of them is a Skrull popgun I left there.”

Primus looked that way, and flick, there was barely a breeze as he vanished. A second later he was back, with said gun in his hand, which he handed over to the Lantern after studying it for a second.

“Not manufactured on Earth,” the Lantern confirmed after his Orb was done scanning it. “Probably Mendicar, judging by the design and radiation signature.”

Primus closed his eyes and exhaled, clearly not very happy with everything going on here. “Okay, Hill, I can see this is a Skrull suicide-glassing. The Tribes are already going crazy, and they are not going to be happy to find one of their towns was wiped out by green aliens. What’s the story here?”

Mr. Hill inhaled his cigar thoughtfully, then glanced down. “Dealer?” he said shortly.

Both of the High Guard were startled when I spoke up promptly.

“Mr. Hill and I came out of a random teleport here.” The Holo popped up with faint electric crackles around it, orienting into a proper map of the area. “We proceeded down the road towards the nearest town, when we noticed a car off the road, and an area of blightburn. There was no sign of the driver or passengers, and all the organic material had been destroyed, much like the plants and animal life nearby, but there was a massive trace of flesh-combusting psi-powered poison in the air.

“Most unusually, the identification of the two in the car indicated a young man and woman, but there was no trace of teeth fillings among the remains.”

Primus’ head snapped sideways, looking in the direction I had indicated, then further ahead to the other cars. After a moment, he nodded for me to continue.

“I followed the blightburn to the hill here, where I found Miss Lania Wind-Moves-Clouds, the source of the poison destroying anything around here. She was obviously in an uncontrolled Core Awakening, so I guided her into a standard Redirection to de-power her Awakening, and got her story out of her as we headed back into town.

“Mr. Hill had proceeded on to the town, and found several more cars off the road along the way, some of which had obviously pursued Miss Clouds and perished while doing so. In one of them he found that sidearm, which he identified via prior experience as being of Skrull design. He entered the town’s limits, and was promptly fired upon by seeming-humans firing identical weapons. Killing several of them rapidly confirmed that they were disguised Skrulls.

“While he drew their attention, I came back into town carrying Miss Clouds, noting that all communication had been jammed. We saw several Skrull corpses in human garb, killed several whose human disguises she recognized who then reverted to Skrulls, and she brought her Killzone back up.

“While Mr. Hill dealt with the command-and-control center he deduced was under the local lumberyard, Miss Clouds and I swept the town and entered the school, where a safe room had been made in the school’s auditorium. Her Killzone wiped the gathered Skrulls out, but that seemed to trigger some sort of self-destruct signal with the death of the elite troopers there.” I replayed a staticky image of the auditorium dying. “The orbital strike came down seconds later as I ran away, and Mr. Hill got clear of the center point in time to survive the surface burst.

“Let me introduce Miss Lania Winds-Moves-Clouds, the last survivor of this town... whose attempted replacement might be the very thing that Awakened her.”

The two High Guard fixed on her sympathetically despite themselves, after giving me careful consideration. Mr. Hill just stood there, cooling off, smoking his cigar, and looking expressionless about it all.

“Miss Clouds, your story, if you please,” Primus said kindly, as Lantern suddenly looked away sharply. His Light swept the area clear of any residual poison, and then burned a Seal into the ground nearby.

A breath later, a score of colorful figures materialized on and around the Seal, spreading out professionally in all directions to assess the situation.

I noticed a Snake, Wolf, and Bear among the Powered here, the most admired Totems of the Tribes, plainly ready for trouble regardless of what the High Guard claimed. The entire party, save for the Snake Priestess and a man in a tech-support suit, took off into the sky in order to get a better look at what had happened.

Lania bowed formally to the Shaman of her people, who returned her bow with a nod, taking in the blightburned area with a glance, and saying nothing as Lania began her story.

I withdrew to give her space with her people, although a glance from Primus was enough to ensure that we both knew that running wasn’t going to be enough to get away.

More pointedly, I could feel earthpower building up underneath Mr. Hill, and there was no Interdiction up. He’d had it built up before the Snake Shaman arrived, so she hadn’t felt anything.

“Damn shame we lost all that tech,” The Mountain said, with the casual easy-come, easy-go voice of long experience. “I even got to their power core and took it off-line. That thing would have been worth some good money.”

“Yeah, just the Energized stuff in the tech can be filtered and melted down for some decent change,” I agreed, crossing my arms on my chest. “But not by us.”

“That’s true,” he agreed, giving my shoulder a pat. His hand was still hot enough to boil water, but that didn’t matter to me.

He had pretty good timing, as Lania was just talking about how all the kids around her at her school began burning away into ash, and all eyes were on her as we silently and smoothly departed.