Perry raised a brow staring at the faux wood grain inches away from his helmet.

“As much as I appreciate the sentiment,” Perry said, poking his finger through the bolt, driving the lock right out of the wood and causing the door to swing open.

“We are on a bit of a time crunch Chase,” Perry said before glancing at Spangle.

“We’re going to the front line at the corner of Anubis and Elaine.” Perry said. “Do you need a ride?”

“It’s as good a place as any,” Spangle said with a shrug. “Sure. I can only run so fast.”

“Don’t you dare -ACK!” Perry shouldered Chase and Spangle and flew out the broken window, aiming for the street where Hardcase was turning the night into day with her floodlight and tracers.

“Set me down next to the mechsuit!” Spangle said, pointing.

“Got it!” Perry said, coming to a halt beside Hardcase and dropping off his passengers.

“Slow down any ones and twos that get past us, can you do that? Perry asked Chase.

“You owe me a new door!” Chase shouted back.

“I’m good for it, just help out!”

“Of course, I’m gonna freakin’ help, you put my daughter in front of the prawns, you maniac!” Chase huffed and turned away directing his attention to some of the prawns climbing nearby buildings. The giant monsters stiffened and collapsed back into the flood of prawns being slowed by Hardcase’s hail of gunfire.

“That’s the spirit!” Perry clapped Chase on the shoulder and turned back to Spangle, who was doing something rather interesting.

Spangle tapped on Hardcase’s clear cockpit to grab her attention and motioned for her to lower the floodlight.

Once it was a bit lower, Spangle put the massive floodlight over her shoulder and threw a fistful of glitter up and into the incredibly bright beam of light.

Perry’s helmet automatically dimmed as Hardcase’s spotlight turned into a riotous mess of glittering color, accelerating into lines of bright light only perceived as dark streaks across his eyeballs.

The approaching prawns got chunked, and the ones who didn’t seemed to struggle to move, covered as they were in glitter. Perry could see dimples in the prawn’s bulletproof skin, where the incredibly hard material was being nearly punctured by the weight of the glitter.

“Thanks,” Spangle said, leaning against Hardcase’s floodlight with a heavy breath. “That was a lot easier than when I do it myself.”

“Wow, thanks.” Wraith said, landing beside them in the moment of breathing room. “How often can you do that?”

“Every two minutes or so, maybe three more times, after that I’m strictly debuffs.”

That’s not a lot of time.

“Alright, let’s do what we can while we can!” Perry said, yanking a Tomward’s Floating Dazzler out of his helmet.

“Close your eyes!” Perry said before hurling the crystal into the midst of the new wave of prawns barreling towards them.

Luckily the prawns didn’t understand English, and were incapable of closing their beady eyes.

Unluckily they didn’t have too much trouble gripping the ground with their outrageously tacky little stub-legs.

It slowed them down, but not much more than that.

“Let’s go tip them!” Perry said, rushing forward with Wraith and Hardcase, getting under the giant monsters and flinging them into the air.

One after another, the creatures were hurled upward, tumbling lazily in the air, wiggling to find their balance.

One well-placed shot from Hardcase sent them spinning through the air toward the wall.

Perry mentally calculated the amount of time it would take them to fly over the wall, and shook his head. Not quite fast enough.

“Shoot them each three times,” Perry said to Hardcase, who nodded and switched to full auto, peppering each of the floating prawns with a burst of gunfire.

They tore through the approaching prawns, creating a wake of prawns like a speedboat.

One of the monsters lunged forward unexpectedly and Perry caught the creature’s wicked mandibles across his chest, bringing back memories of his first battle against the armored caterpillars.

It’s amazing to me how far I’ve come, Perry thought, whipping his sword off his back and relieving the monster of its mandibles before putting the long shard of volcanic glass through its brain, causing it to shudder to a halt.

The mandibles had left a scratch in his armor, which was rapidly fading.

Individual prawns were no longer much of a threat to him, but Perry liked having video games to play, people to play with, stores to shop at, pretty girls to shop with, beds to sleep in...

All of those things required homo sapiens and the elaborate concrete constructions they nested in.

Perry saw the tail of a prawn disappear into a broken hole in the side of a nearby apartment building.

“I’ll round them up!” Perry shouted, flying in after the prawn.

It wasn’t the first one into the building. Perry could hear screaming and breaking wood ahead of the ass-end of the one he was following.

Perry turned his jets of and streaked past, dragging the sword along the monster’s armor and unzipping it as he blasted past.

Perry spotted another one squirming its way into an apartment several flights of stairs up. Judging by the high-pitched screams, the tenant was still alive, which was good for Perry’s mental state.

BFS.EXE (5)

Five floating armaments manifested around Perry and he made five quick stabs with his obsidian sword before hooking all five blades into the prawn’s armor and hauling it out of the woman’s apartment like a reticent fish.

Once the monster was dragged out of the apartment wall, Perry dispatched it with a slice to the brain stem, leaving an impression of himself on the ceiling where it bucked him into the concrete.

Once the monster was twitching on the staircase, Perry caught his breath.

Aerosolized.

Perry grabbed two cans of foam and gave the girlish-sounding man on the other side of the shattered drywall an apologetic shrug.

“Stay put sir, we’re sweeping through the area, and you’re far more likely to get hurt if you try to flee,” Perry said as he whipped out a quick sheet of foam that hardened into a concrete-like substance, blocking the gaping man off from sight in a matter of seconds.

Perry did a quick fly up and down the stairs, but there were no more prawn-sized holes in the walls, so he headed back out to the street, kicking a pile of man-sized rubble in front of the hole and foaming it in place before tossing aside the cannister and rejoining the fight.

They pushed the prawns back, inch by inch, until they connected with another street whose residents doing the same thing on block to the left of them.

A blast of green fire drove a prawn reeling backwards as John Gabras rumbled forward on his horse-cycle, flanked by his whooping minions.

I guess they got out of jail, Perry thought as John locked eyes on him.

vvv Translated from Manitian vvv

“Good evening, you son of a whore!” John shouted across the intersection “I’m surprised your teammates can stomach the stench wafting off of you!”

“I see you got a streak of white hair,” Perry said, motioning to his head. “I didn’t realize I scared you that badly. I’ll be gentler next time I trounce you!”

“It seems like an inconvenient time to pursue a blood feud,” John said, motioning to the mindless monsters streaming toward them. “Truce?”

“Sunrise?” Perry asked.

“If your filthy half-breed word can last that long. I suppose your earth half might have some residual honor.”

“I think I can spare your hair further discomfort for a single night.”

“I’ll kill you later then, Zauberer!” John cackled, before launching a Threads of Gintax into a pile of prawns. The monsters broke the webs easily, but the clinging fragments continued to drain the life out of them, turning the monsters to dust in seconds.

The streak of white hair vanished, along with the crow’s feet at the corners of John’s eyes. Perry saw a throbbing essence cross the distance between the nocul and his prey, drawn into his chest like smoke into a hoover. Pure life, perhaps? Time?

“Praise Gintax!” The prince shouted in exulation, suddenly looking younger than Perry. “Thank you for this bounteous harvest!”

Was he waiting until I could watch him regain lifespan? Just to show me he could? Perry raised a brow, but no one saw it under his helmet.

^^^Translated from Manitian^^^

“Now you’re speaking Manitian,” Heather said with a thick Italian accent, pinching her fingers together in the ‘italian’ symbol.

“Shaddap. He says he’s not gonna attack us until daybreak, but I would keep an eye out, ya know. People are often true to their word, but if we are in a bad spot, it might look pretty tempting to finish us off.”

“Gotcha. Let’s show these wusses who they’re dealing with.” Wraith said, springing upward before rebounding off a street lamp, turning her entire body into a spike and smashing through a prawn’s brain-stem.

Then she did it again.

"Is somebody keeping score!?" Wraith shouted on her way to her next victim.

Up ahead, maybe four blocks away, Perry could make out flashes of light from where the sweepers and tinkers were sealing up the breach. Perry might not be the key to saving the whole city, seeing as his team was on cleanup, but exterminating prawns and saving lives directly was gratifying as hell.

Perry assumed John was mostly fighting because he lived nearby.

I wonder how that draining kid is doing? Perry wondered, thinking of Plagius. For someone like that, this situation would either make his career, or send him to an early grave.

I guess we’ll see which it is, Perry thought, shielding his eyes as Spangle unleashed another spray of glitter, pinning a wide swath of prawns to the ground.

***Brett Everson, AKA Plagius***

“Whaddya mean I can’t board the train? I got a ticket!” Brett demanded, waving his ticket. “There’s freaking prawns running loose in the streets, and this is the only safe place!

“Like I said, the train isn’t leaving for another week,” The enormous metal man with the horns and the billowing cloud behind him said, arms crossed like a bouncer. “That means it isn’t boarding for another week.”

“C’mon, man, I’m a paying customer, you at least gotta protect me until this wall breach blows over.”

“The only duty I have is to protect the train and its occupants. Since you are not an occupant yet, I have no compulsion to protect you.” The giant robot said.

“Which is why you should let me on the train, then I’ll be an occupant.”

“Train’s not boarding for another week,” the metal man said, returning the conversation back to the beginning.

“Dangit!” Brett said, punching the wall of the train.

The metal man raised an eyebrow, his gaze locked on where Brett’s knuckles connected with the train’s heavy steel siding.

“I, um, sorry.” Brett said, flinching away from the robot’s gaze.

“You’re lucky you pose no tangible threat to either me or the train. I suggest you put your powers to work defending your city rather than attempting to shirk responsibility.”

“Responsibility!?” Plagius demanded, his mood turning instantly. “They tried to lock me up! For an accident! They wanna keep me in prison for the rest of my life because they think I might be a bad guy! What responsibility do I have to them?”

The enormous metal man frowned, idly watching a civilian run screaming down the street, chased by a wriggling prawn, showing no interest in helping.

“Consider it your responsibility to yourself to prove that you’re not a villain. That you’re a human.” the chrome giant said with a shrug. “Or perhaps your responsibility to not be a bitch and do what is required of you.”

The prawn caught sight of the two of them and changed directions, charging them, stampeding across the trainyard, bowling forklifts and carts out of the way as it focused on the two of them, air rushing in and out of it’s mandibles as it barreled forward.

Brett flinched backwards with a yelp, closing his eyes as red flashed in front of them.

I’m not dead?

When he opened his eyes again, the prawn was twitching in front of them, mortally wounded.

“There. A head-start.” The metal man said, motioning impassively.

Could I? Brett thought, creeping toward the twitching monster.

“You might want to do your thing before it dies,” The chrome giant said, seemingly bored.

Stirred into action, Brett lunged forward and placed his hands on the creature’s body, unleashing his power.

OOOH MY GOOOOD! Brett’s eyes widened as a rush of power throbbed through every cell in his body.

A minute later, the prawn stopped twitching.

“Yeah! HELL YEAH! I’m gonna track down a thousand of those things tonight!” Plagius shouted “And I’m gonna beat them half to death and drain every last one of them!”

His heart was hammering in his chest, and he felt like he could lift tons with no effort whatsoever. He felt like a god in human form.

“Whoo!” Plagius jumped twelve feet in the air, proving that the feeling was more than just a chemical rush. He really was that strong.

“Thank you!” Plagius shouted over his shoulder as he ran back into the street, scanning for the nearest Prawn.

“You’re welcome, Brett,” Matador said, still standing impassively in front of the train, arms crossed.

Plagius bounded down the street until he spotted a prawn munching on the side of a building, seemingly burrowing into the concrete.

“Listen up, you oversized caterpillar, I’mma -ACK!”

The prawn casually whipped Plagius with its tail fin and sent him sailing through a building.

“Okay,” Plagius coughed out some drywall dust as he pushed himself to his feet. “Obviously this is going to take a little effort.”

He bounded pack out and latched onto the creature’s back, going on a merry ride as he tried to drain its power.

After a few seconds, it managed to buck him off before slapping him with its tail and embedding him six inches into the asphalt.

“Ow.” Plagius groaned, staring up into the sky.

Then the mandibles were there above him.

“Crap!”

Adrenaline singing through his body Plagius grabbed onto the mandibles and instant before they locked around him, holding them apart while simultaneously draining the monster’s power.

It began to thrash about, slamming him into every nearby building and then some in a mindless attempt to dislodge him.

There’s gotta be a better way of doing this, Plagius thought as concrete dust got into his eyes.

Everyone’s score by sunrise: A ballpark figure

Paradox: 40 kills, 28 removals, 30 assists.

Hardcase: 5 kills, 70 removals, 50 assists

Wraith: 60 kills, 12 removals, 5 assists,

Spangle: 35 kills, 0 removals, 80 assists.

Chase: 0 kills, 0 removals, 60 assists.

John Gabras: 80 kills, 0 removals, 0 assists.

Matador: 120 kills, 0 removals, 1 assist.

Plagius: 3 Kills, 0 removals, 0 assists.