Mary had not expected her target to have such good reflexes.  Or was it precognition?  Hard to tell: airsoft guns were quiet, but the cape had reacted so quickly it was obvious that she’d known what was coming.  Mary stopped firing when it became obvious that she was the new target here, repositioning away from the edge of the roof and reloading as the biker was acrobatically scaling the battlefield to get to her.

Sidestep couldn’t see Mary when she made it to the top, and was holding her breath.  It meant she could only tell that a canister of gas was exhaling its contents by the hissing sound it made.  In reality, the dry-tasting contents were enveloping her in a cloud of Dragon’s specialty, and one misstep, one tiny release of energy would set her up in conflagration.  Her weapons were injured, and she was vulnerable to Mary’s own, so the girl took the chance to lower her guard a little bit.

[color=00aeef]“Don’t attack.  You’ll kill yourself.”[/color]  Her voice was muffled by her gasmask, but not so much that Sidestep surely wouldn’t be able to tell where she was.  [color=00aeef]“Which group are you fighting for?”[/color]  Sidestep still couldn’t see Mary, but she’d be able to tell that she was young, and it sounded like she just wanted to talk.

Dragon was more actively busy.  “Fire guy,” turned out to be a bit more than she had bargained for.  She recognized that the chemical reaction she witnessed was just that: a chemical reaction, not an exploding fireball.  So he had more than just fire powers.

Then again, that still didn’t mean he could defeat her.  The explosion wasn’t anything she wasn’t built for: her whole body was designed to handle concussive and heat damage like that.  She rode the shockwave, letting it slow her and knock her closer to the ground.  She’d been hoping to catch him unaware with her silent death-from-above maneuver, but obviously that had not worked.

Instead, she waited a moment, so that it would look like his explosion worked.  And it worked: he crowed and changed targets, lobbing yet another different attack at one of the helicopters above.  Perhaps they should have scared those away, but there was little time to think of that: now was the time to strike.

Strike she did.  A fiery pillar erupted in a cone behind her, propelling the construct forward at a terrifying speed.  The move didn’t even give Pipeline time to register, much less react, in his distracted state, and she slammed all of that force into his spinal cord at the neck.  Her metal claws, held out pointy-ends-first, impacted him with enough force to pop and elephant’s head clear off, and she didn’t stop there, trying to drive him forward to slam through the building on the other side.  She would have managed it, too, had a car door not suddenly slammed into the two of them, knocking out some of her speed and causing them to slam into the building less gracefully and powerfully than she’d hoped.  Still, overkill wasn’t strictly necessary.  She figured she had surely killed her target, and used her other claw to pry him off of her occupied one.  Next.

Whoever had thrown that door.  No one threw doors at her, it was just one of the rules.  One she’d only just now made up, because that was the first door flung her way, but still.  Rules were rules, or at least her own rules were.  Screw everyone else’s rules.  She turned her attention that way, flying through the bulletstorm between them, mechanical eyes locked on Holly.