“SUPERHOT!” Blair shouted, her hand glowing as she melted through the bottom of the train car, sending a yelp of pain from Rosemary’s mouth as Blair began to fall. Thomas watched Blair break both of her legs on the ground.

“Blair! Why the hell did you do that!” Thomas shouted, trying to escape through the hole Blair left but the train was squeezing in too fast. By the time he was able to get close to the space, the size of a large elevator had been ferociously crushed into something the size of a play place tube. Thomas was stuck buried alive under metal and wires as he began to suffocate.

Blair had reformed her broken legs to their previous state after purposefully burning them with Superhot on the way down. She was standing now, placing up her hands in a fighting stance as she faced Rosemary Krokodil head-on. “Let him go, Rosemary.”

“What are you going to do if I don’t?”

“I don’t think you know this, but this battle is just as personal for me as it is for you.” Blair had suddenly kicked a patch of molten concrete from the ground straight towards Rosemary’s face, forcing her to block the blast with some of her wires, burning that section of her skin in the process. Rosemary shouted in pain, preparing a counterattack by forming a fist with her threads, but Blair had already unleashed a furious cavalcade of steam-powered punches in rapid succession straight at Rosemary’s face, melting through her wires and burning even more of her skin.

“Enough!” she shouted, pulling herself away from Blair and hurling Thomas’s train coffin from the sky towards Blair, forcing her to use steam under her feet to dodge out of the way.

“Thomas!” Blair shouted, running over and preparing to melt through the train but stopped. She remembered Thomas’s comment about gasoline and thought about Rosemary’s nature of creating traps. She turned away from the train towards Rosemary. “You filled him with gasoline, didn’t you? Thought you had me all figured out, huh?” Blair said, giving Rosemary the side-eye as she faced confidently away from her.

“Maybe I did, Blair. Maybe I didn’t. One thing’s for certain, though: Thomas is trapped in there until you do something about it. He’s suffocating in there, you know. I would’ve killed him if you hadn’t forced my hand.” Patrons were beginning to see what was happening outside, but the bouncers had been instructed to keep people away from the fight.

Goddammit, why is she so calm? I need to get her fired up if I want to do any real damage to her.

“You said earlier that this was personal. What did you mean?”

Blair clenched her fist as she took a step over.

“You blew up a train I was on eight years ago. Thomas here saved my life that night, pulling me from the wreckage. I saw how your Civ worked. I suppose I should thank you, though,” Blair said, turning fully to face her. “If you weren’t such an ass, I wouldn’t get the pleasure of beating the shit out of you.”

She’s taking the bait. Now that her heart rate is higher than mine, Wirebaby can turn her into a ticking time bomb! Rosemary cackled internally, her face twisting into a sick scarlet grin. Blair’s heartbeat was screaming with not just the effort of sprinting towards Rosemary but also the rage of confronting a long-time enemy. And she was inside of her range.

“Well, that’s interesting. It’ll feel good to finish an old job.”

‘You’re dead, Rosemary. You hear that! Dead!” Blair shouted, raising a burning fist and preparing to dive it into Rosemary’s smug face.

“Wirebaby,” she whispered, and a dozen threads burrowed into Blair’s face and torso as Rosemary chuckled with the laugh of a victor. Blair’s skin started to melt all over her body. “This is sulfuric acid, Blair,” she said, sauntering around Blair as she held her perfectly still with the wires. “I’m making it out of the sulphur and hydrogen in your body. It’s highly corrosive,” Rosemary whispered, watching Blair begin to melt like an ice cream out in the summer heat. But she wasn’t screaming.

“And highly explosive,” Blair said before Rosemary’s vision became filled with nothing but white-hot light as she was sent flying backwards into the outside wall of The Snapping Jaws. As her vision returned, she saw the dozens of chunks of Blair reform themselves into the complete person she was before she was attacked, leaving Rosemary lying on the ground, burned and corroding. “You thought you were the only one who could set a trap?”

“Enough!” Rosemary gurgled, beginning to crawl forward from her seated position as she stared at her charred and acid-coated skin. “You think you have the strength to land a final blow on me? Let’s see what you are willing to give up to land it!” Rosemary shouted, her voice manic and furious as she sent in a series of red wires through the club’s window, and began to snake around the dance floor, wrapping around the legs of patrons and pulling in a young woman at breakneck speed towards her, wrapping her in sharp wire before grabbing her in a chokehold and pulling her to her chest, holding a wire to her throat. The girl looked to be no older than eighteen, and she was staring around at the mess of wires that was holding her to the body of this strange woman. There was a look of confusion and panic in her eyes, and she started to speak her many questions before Rosemary placed a hand over her mouth, further amplifying her visible panic. “Get the fuck away from me, Blair or I’ll kill this little girl! You’d hate for someone innocent to die, right?” Rosemary hissed, her throat gurgling with the symptoms of acid burns.

Blair began walking back, her eyes wide as she held out a hand in a calming motion at Rosemary. “Okay, Rosemary. Fine, you win. Just don’t hurt her. She has nothing to do with this!”

“You are in no position to make demands! Her heart is beating fast enough that I could turn into a fucking bag of rat poison right now! SO, GET THE FUCK BACK!”

“People are watching us, Rosemary. You’re caught. Don’t make the situation worse for yourself.”

“I’m not caught! You’re the ones in the trap, NOT ME!”

“No, Blair’s right.”

Rosemary heard a voice from behind her, turning around to see Phantom Limb, dressed head to toe in his costume, the bright metal hands adorning his body shining brightly in the red light coming from inside The Snapping Jaws. “And I feel like that’s something I should say a lot more.”