Riftmaker had wondered if they’d been underestimating Team Icon but now? Now he just kind of felt silly at even thinking they’d deserved to be considered a speedbump. And maybe slightly guilty at just how easily they’d mopped the floor with them.
They’d had numbers, seven of them to the five villains, and the hero team had even been backed up by P.H.O.T.O.N.’s on site security personnel, a few of which had broken out some of the toys the lab kept on hand. And with all that, they’d still barely lasted five minutes once the battle had began.
Riftmaker and Sand Devil had come in loud to catch their attention and get everyone running to the cluttered loading bay out front. Icon admittedly had a fantastic reaction time down because the two only had time to knock over a few of P.H.O.T.O.N.’s non-powered security before the heroes had shown up on the scene. What followed though was just embarrassing.
Val took out Clear Cut the moment he’d stepped out of a crowd of guards with a single superspeed punch to the jaw as the opening to the whole confrontation. Seconds later, Turnaround had forced Brave Blast to hammer both Ring Wrestler and Ultra Gal with his powers, causing them to crumple as she just kept redirecting the hero’s shots at them. The muscle-head didn’t let up even when it was clear that the moment his gloves glowed, he’d immediately be rotated directly towards his friends. Once his teammates succumbed to unconsciousness from friendly fire, Sand Devil reconstituted herself behind him, looking like a shadow peeled itself off the ground which suddenly filled in with her usual blood red coloration, and sent him flying onto the roof with a pillar of sand instantly jetting up from beneath his feet. Her body immediately dissolved and reformed into a giant shadowy serpent that slithered away to terrorize the guards the trio had been accompanying.
The villains had toyed with a few more armed guards before the rest of Team Icon had emerged, not that they did much to help. Terrorantula had slipped behind everyone in the confusion and simply shoulder checked Deck Sweeper into a stack of steel drums. It had been a perfect ambush from above, executed from atop the building itself which she’d swiftly climbed up, causing his broom shaped blaster to go flying halfway across the battlefield. Before he could extract himself from the resulting pile, she’d webbed the hero down where he struggled in vain.
As for Riftmaker, he’d set one of his gauntlets to high yield and slammed Steel Heron and Captain Plasma into the hanger doors they’d been guarding, knocking them out instantly and leaving two indentations in the thick metal. It wasn’t as though the pair didn’t manage to get off a single shot, but Riftmaker’s hardlight shields basically tossed aside Heron’s thrown feather projectiles while Plasma hadn’t really aimed at the villain so much as fired in the general direction of him.
Now he was carving a hole into the warehouse’s side with his lasers while the rest of the team went about mopping up the remaining armed guards around the exterior, giving him time to mentally compare just how weak this team had been versus just the two members of Elemental Aegis. Hell, he still remembered hitting ArachNed with that cable only for it to barely slow him down for a couple seconds. He’d learned from footage online that the guy apparently shrugged off slamming into a car from his top velocity when his line had snapped mid-chase. Riftmaker bet that the spider hero would probably tank just about everything this team had just thrown out and get right back up to beat them all black and blue.
He realized this train of thought was just a disguised way of giving himself the jitters over the upcoming battle, mentally working his way up to hyping up the Starlight Squad when he should be taking the easy win as reassurance. Calm down and stick to the plan, he told himself.
“You gonna be okay with only three shots left?” Turnaround strolled up to him, apparently having finished her sweep. He wasn’t quite sure how her powers would’ve worked on a singular opponent, even unpowered, but then he spotted the reinforced areas on her costume’s knuckles which seemed to be sporting a few red speckles.
“First up, it’s per gauntlet, so I actually have seven. Secondly, I said I can’t rapid fire them more than four times in a row. Give me a moment to cool off and I’ll be good to go,” Riftmaker explained, glancing over at a heat readout in the corner of his visor. Sure enough, the indicator was under a quarter of the way full for his left gauntlet but was dropping quickly. He bet he’d be fully cooled off by the time the Starlight Squad showed up.
“That’s what he said,” Turnaround joked, causing Riftmaker to roll his eyes behind the helmet. “Oh that’s almost done.”
Riftmaker looked up and saw his circular cut was indeed almost finished. He watched as the laser finally met the point where he’d started. A few more seconds and it was done. He made to approach it, figuring he’d give it a punch and cave it in, only for Turnaround to put a hand on his shoulder and smile at him. She gestured with her hand and the section of the wall rotated like the center of it was on a hinge.
“Give it a yank,” she wiggled an eyebrow at him and laughed at her own humor.
Riftmaker saw no reason not to do so, and pulled on the wheel with his gravitor gauntlet, causing the whole thing to lurch free of the hole and tumble the few inches to the ground. The two villains both cursed and moved out of the way as it rolled towards them, spiraling past where they’d been standing, eventually smacking into some debris from the fight and toppling over.
“Have you two finished?” Sand Devil’s body reconstructed itself in front of them.
Riftmaker had watched as she’d turned into a wraith of pitch black sand earlier with a skeletal face and chased down groups of terrified guards, engulfing them and flinging them through the air as they screamed. Hilariously, a few had been armed with specialty weapons from P.H.O.T.O.N. that probably could’ve done some nasty work against Sand Devil, even in that form, had their instincts been to pull the triggers rather than flee. Devil hadn’t seemed to care about that as she pursued them, either knowing that her opponents would flinch or simply she believed she would be fine. Riftmaker wasn’t sure which one scared him more.
Turnaround was about to answer her when Val zipped past them with a hover cart she’d assembled back at the van. For all Turnaround’s complaining of her top speed, it turned out that 280 km/h still kind of looked like a blur when you were standing still. As the three of them watched her pass by, Terrorantula appeared behind them unnoticed, her face suddenly appearing in Riftmaker’s peripheral vision as she leaned in between him and Turnaround.
“Good, we’re making excellent time,” she flashed her pointed teeth in a wicked grin. “Let’s get inside and set the trap while whoever we haven’t introduced to the pavement calls for backup.”
The villains were all too eager to oblige, piling in through the hole and dodging an outbound Val who had loaded the cart up in the short time since she’d entered.
They burst into a section of the depot full of rows of shelves, most laden with an assortment of storage bins, crates, barrels, and cardboard boxes, sitting roughly in the dead center of the place. Looking down the rows, Riftmaker saw that towards the front of the massive room that made up most of the interior, the shelves yielded their floor space to lines of massive metal shipping containers closer to the front hanger doors. A few of them were cracked open and had been in the process of being either loaded or unloaded before the attack, but most seemed to be piled up away from the large doors, forming a small maze that left some empty room past the doors for vehicles to be loaded up inside the warehouse.
In the opposite direction, towards the back of the facility, the shelves once again abruptly ended, but unlike the front of the facility, this was just a whole lot of empty space which seemed to be waiting for more things for P.H.O.T.O.N. to move in. This open area was marked with a messy pile of what looked like unsorted containers right where the shelves ended as though they were waiting for additional rows to rise up out of the concrete expanse beyond them so they could be sorted appropriately. Riftmaker suspected that the main lab might have a few hoarders on staff from the state of this place and someone clearly bought enough floor space to accommodate them.
While the warehouse awaited more shelves to transform this pocket from what looked like an empty hanger for small aircraft into yet more storage, it looked like the various guards, rent-a-heroes, and other staff at this place had set up a cozy little spot towards the back corner. They’d set up free standing curtain racks to form a pitiful “wall”, dragged some shitty old couches into a loose rectangle, and run a set of extension cords out to power a television and some minifridges, along with other small comforts. They’d even thrown down a rug.
Despite a stairway above the tiny living space leading to what appeared to be some staff rooms as well as a shitty warehouse version of a breakroom, it looked like Team Icon and the others that had to babysit this place clearly decided to make this little spot on the warehouse floor their own. It probably went a long way towards making the shifts here a little more tolerable than Riftmaker bet P.H.O.T.O.N.’s managers knew about. He almost felt guilty for blowing this gig for them but the payoff was too sweet. Besides, they’d still had a pretty good reaction time so it wasn’t like they were relaxing as much as they should be with a setup like this.
Opposite the cozy den, on the other far corner was the fleet of forklifts and powered carts that the staff would break out to actually move anything around here. Nothing looked like it would work as well as a hovercart powered by a speedster so he didn’t bother heading down that way. Instead he made his way towards the front where those shipping containers were sitting. He knew his lasers would be more than happy to help open them up.
Along the way, he took out a few ambitious guards who had been planning their own ambush for the villains in here, using a cable to secure them, as he took stock of the warehouse’s contents. A couple of the boxes and storage bins had labels, but a lot of them were just stamped with P.H.O.T.O.N.’s logo on the side.
“How do we know what we’re looking for?” he asked into the comms network.
Val answered him as she came speeding in, her voice quicker than he’d ever heard before, “I grabbed a manifest and have been trusting everything’s in the right spot. Could you make sure the three green ones and the blue one by the front are open? Then the red, black, and green ones back by the shelves. I’ll then need you to move a few of those crates off the high shelves over on the row closest to you? Terror, please lower the ones on the second from the last one on the right while you’re setting up your traps. Devil…”
She rattled off which shelves she wanted cleared over the comms as she kept emptying the lower shelves near the hole they made. Riftmaker decided it was time to quicken his pace with his jet boots in order to speed up cracking the shipping containers – even though she'd probably get them last. It wasn’t like he’d have the time to do this once the fighting started and Val might need to prioritize them if things got hectic too close to the shelves.
As he finished up her first set of requests, he kept listening as she kept rattling off more directions to him and the rest of the team, sometimes becoming muffled by her speed or distance as she raced between the warehouse and the drop off point, completing a few runs in the couple of minutes since they’d managed to get inside.
“They’re on the way,” Celestial’s voice came in over the comms. “T-minus four minutes. Sounds like you guys actually overdid it and someone only now just woke up to call it in. Props to the Icon rep on-hand, he worked quick to pass it along to Amberheart. Oh, and Sun Light’s pissed.”
“Thanks,” Terrorantula said from atop one of the shelves, looking down at the lines of web she’d woven throughout the stacks. “Devil, Rift, finish moving the last of those to the lower level and get ready. Turnaround, kill the lights once they're done. Val, you’ve got two more trips before I want you by the door controls.”
Everyone hurried to follow their orders as the spider woman set a few more lines of sticky silk throughout the air around them. As the lights flicked off, everyone but Riftmaker pulled out their goggles, cutting through the darkness. The group hunkered down, listening to periodic updates from Celestial as she monitored the heroes’ movement, but obviously couldn’t tell what their gameplan was going to be since they weren’t radioing that information in. That left waiting in silence while Celestial would count down for them and Val shot back and forth.
After her second trip, the speedster flew past Riftmaker’s hiding spot to go to the door controls towards the front of the room, crouching down behind the panel and eyeing the wall nearby her with an extremely nervous body language he could make out from this distance.
With no way to know where the heroes were going to enter from, she along with everyone else in the depot that wasn’t currently tied up by Riftmaker’s cables or Terrorantula’s webbing were stuck feeling exposed, like their hiding spots had all their blindspots turned in the wrong directions. Even with Turnaround pumping smoke out through the entrance hole to get the heroes’ attention through a creative use of one of the guard’s busted weapons, the bait didn’t guarantee that they’d try to come in that way.
The villains obviously had done what they could to mitigate the risks, mostly by using Terror’s webbing to take care of the obvious alternative entrances. What windows and skylights existed were covered up by slabs of metal sheeting stolen off the shelves (seriously, a massive hoarder problem) stuck in place by reinforced webbing. Thick strands of the stuff flowed throughout the air with a few hidden surprises woven inside to punish anyone who decided that they wanted to make a dramatic entrance by punching a hole through the ceiling. Sand Devil had scattered a number of small piles of sand against several patches of the walls, apparently able to turn each of them into something nasty rather quickly should a hero make a surprise entrance nearby them. As for Riftmaker , he spooled up his lasers and set the onboard targeting system to ping any motion. It had a rudimentary friend-or-foe detection which would basically flag anything that wasn’t one of the villains around him as an enemy so long as it could make them out, allowing him to quickly locate an intruder.
All in all, they were as prepared as they could be for a group of villains hunkering down in the dark, waiting for heroes to make their way in.
Celestial’s voice crackled over the comms again, “Visual on targets. All three of them are approaching. They’ll be on site in fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen...”
Riftmaker tensed, feeling his mouth go dry as Celestial continued.
“Five, four, three, two…” she counted down in everyone’s ears. “One. Mark. They’re on the scene.”
The silence in the air became a thick blanket, smothering them all in the darkness. Moments crept by in agonizing slowness as the villains tensed in wait for the heroes to take stock of the scene and make their move.
They continued to wait. A full minute passed in agonizing quiet. Then another.
“Celestial?” Terror prodded, an edge creeping into her voice.
“The drones I’ve got on scene only have eyes on Orbit. He’s floating by the hole but doesn’t seem to be in any rush to actually do anything. It’s like he’s waiting for something,” she told them. “Reflecta and Sun Light both popped up for a second but I can’t get a view on them anywhere near the depot. They’ve vanished.”
Riftmaker’s internal alarms were screaming at him that everything was going wrong. By all accounts, Sun Light’s M.O. was to go in loud and proud, first in the breach and shrugging off all abuse thrown her way. She didn’t just slink into the shadows when arriving on the scene. Even if she had smelled the trap and wasn’t going to come barreling in through the opening they’d left for her, she should be breaking through the walls. Cosmic’s brat didn’t do “hang back and wait ‘em out.”
Riftmaker glanced over at the hanger doors but didn’t see any dents forming there either. Sure, Celestial probably was watching the front door but he couldn’t help but think that Sun Light would’ve picked either smashing in from above or busting down the front door for her grand entrance.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
He knew Reflecta was the level headed member of the team, which was part of why it felt like drawing the short straw with her, but Riftmaker had a hard time imagining her holding back Little Miss Face Puncher from a fight for this long. As every second passed, he knew more and more that something had gone wrong but couldn’t for the life of him figure out what the Starlight Squad could be planning, only that it was going to be flashy and feel like someone had thrown a bag full of bricks at them. The wait for that was the hard part.
The motion trackers in his suit screamed an alarm and threw up with a visual indicator pointing towards the back of the warehouse, not that he needed it since his head was already following the loud bang coming from that direction half a second before his suit had registered it.
A television was sailing through the air alongside something wrapped in a rug. At the height of its upwards arc, the fabric slipped away to reveal a large slab of metal which Riftmaker realized with horror was a manhole cover. His eyes shot downwards and he saw another object floating in midair where the cozy little living area had once been before the rug had been torn upwards at high speed.
His suit’s enhanced optics let him zoom in to see and he cursed as he recognized the glint of light off the unnatural object, shouting into the comms, “MIRROR!”
His warning was too late for Turnaround to act on it, even if she’d been closer, as suddenly the world exploded into light.
---------------------------------
Sarah Stellar, aka Sun Light, gnashed her teeth as her team flew above the winding roads of Victory City towards the P.H.O.T.O.N. storehouse. They’d just gotten a call from Arthur Android, the non-combat support member of Team Icon, telling them that a group of five villains had taken out the guards and heroes on site and were ransacking the place. Her stomach churned at the thought of the lab blaming her team but even the thought of it happening on her watch still felt like the least of her worries.
The past two weeks had been hell. Actually, this whole year had been but in a different way, but now everything was falling apart both citywide and in her personal life. With the crime spree going on, she was way behind everyone else in her class and she’d already fumbled several big tests. Even though the teachers were working with Amberheart to let her make up for it, the fact that she’d been roped into emergency duty for the past couple weeks meant she hadn’t had a chance to study once in two weeks, getting home exhausted after every shift – even the “light” patrol ones. Not that she probably would be able to focus on books even if the other heroes had managed to wrangle all of the villains under control given what else was happening.
At the start of the year, her dad had scared off her then boyfriend, Finn Fritz, over what was supposed to be a friendly dinner after she’d had the courage to finally introduce him, ruining everything like always. With absolute perfect timing, Mina told her that queen bitch Calli had asked him out a couple weeks back, right before Maniacal got fried. She’d gone into that fight with her head all messed up and gotten too many hits from scrubs she should’ve been able to dance around easily. Oh! And dad apparently thought everything was A-Oh-Fucking-Kay about that!
“If he moved on that quick then he wasn’t right for you,” he had the nerve to say!
Sarah wanted to rip her hair out after punching him in the face! It was all his fault Finn had “moved on” in the first place when he’d outright threatened him! Dad had got it in his head that it was Finn’s fault that she wanted to go to Celta State rather than Neo Ultra University, telling her she was giving up her future just for some boy, even though it had been her decision to change colleges in the first place. Finn had been the one to change his school for hers but try telling that to Commander Cosmic!
Since then it had been month after month of him acting like he knew everything and wouldn’t back off! Even after Aunt Flec had split the team, he kept poking in over the comms to backseat hero almost every job she’d done. It had gotten even worse since the Stormdaughter had shown up. At first, Sarah had been excited to team up with the legendary goddess-turned-superhero, only for her first impromptu team up to involve her dad trying call all the shots over the radio while he was patrolling elsewhere. It had been absolutely mortifying and she’d been thankful the only people there to see it, other than her team and Thana herself (which Sarah would never live down in her life), had been a few D-list villains. No one would believe them if they said they fought her and the Stormdaughter together so who cared if they heard her having to basically yell into her earbud to get him to back off, but she still cringed every single time she thought about it.
She was about to literally explode if he kept it up and was almost grateful for the distress call before that had turned into irritation just as quick. The nerve of them for messing with the Starlight Squad! She needed to beat up these villains to let off some steam. They’d picked the wrong hidden warehouse to rob!
Messing with the Starlight Squad… Something tickled at the back of her brain through the soup of anger as she raced ahead.
...Beat up… hidden warehouse…
Oh...
Abruptly, she slowed her flight down, causing both Reflecta and Orbit to match her speed.
“This is a trap, isn’t it?” she realized aloud.
Both of their masks obscured their faces but she could tell at least Aunt Flec was smiling, “I was wondering when you’d notice.”
Sure enough, Aunt Flec was always willing to let others fly headfirst into a mistake if she thought you’d learn from it. She was the type of woman who strongly believed the best teacher was failure, accompanied with a soft lecture afterwards. Touch the stove, run with scissors, and try to fight a group of villains without a plan. As long as she believed she could step in before things got too rough, she was more than pleased for you to get all the cuts, scrapes, and bruises that came with a particularly stupid choice and then coach you through what you should’ve done.
As a kid, Sarah had hated that, feeling like her dad’s friend was being mean and enjoyed watching you mess up just so she could tell you off. But as she grew up, Sarah saw that the lessons you learned from those missteps stuck with you, just like they had here. She could tell this job was just like the Toxic Twins’ ambush from a few months back where what seemed like an easy job had ended up with Wavelength and Star Racer both trapped in a vat of slime and Sarah had ended up with a black eye right before senior photo day.
“I’m not sure,” Uncle Bit said. “I feel like it was inevitable that this place would get hit the longer the crime wave kept up. Could just be some idiots who thought only Icon was nearby.”
“Yeah, but I mean, if you know it’s there, and you know it’s the kind of place that you need a couple of real supervillains to take on, AND you know that it’s got the loot to make it worth hiring on that many other villains, then you’ve got to know that we’re nearby, right?” Sarah let her train of thought play out loud. “P.H.O.T.O.N. has been really secretive about this hidden base so it would take just as much digging to find out about them as it would be to find out they’ve got us backing them up.”
“And this crime wave is just as much about the prestige as the profit,” Flec finished her thoughts. “So you think they’re baiting us in order to ambush us?”
“Yeah…”
“Are we calling in the others?” she asked with a note of evaluation in her voice.
Sarah bit her lip. Aunt Flec wasn’t trying to pressure her into saying yes, just reminding her that was an option. Actually it wasn’t just an option. If someone had written a hypothetical handbook on heroing, it would’ve been the textbook answer to a situation like this. Sarah knew it and hated it.
Aunt Flec had been trying to train her to be a leader in the future and to make smart judgment calls, but Sarah didn’t know if that’s what she wanted to do with her life. Yes, she wanted to be a hero, but other than the fact that she was Commander Cosmic’s daughter, did she even feel like she was the team leader type? She’d spent her whole life as just another part of the team and wasn’t sure she wanted to change that.
When this whole long fight with her dad had started, everyone had just assumed she’d go over to the Young Guardians and take over there, but like… if she still wanted to go to college, even at CSU, then she really couldn’t balance leading a team and the schoolwork. And she definitely couldn’t land any dates even without her dad’s interference if she was running her own squad.
And like, what? Say she took over for a year, maybe two if she didn’t go to CSU immediately. Hardly felt like that was enough time to get to know anyone on that team, and she’d be abandoning the Squad, her family, for something that… temporary. Plus, Phantom Foil was a good leader despite what people said. He was kind, and nice, and tried his best, and when the rumors had started he’d come to her in private to ask if she wanted to take over. She’d known he needed to be told he was doing a good job and all the talk was getting to him and she’d promised him she was sticking with the Squad. If she suddenly reversed and asked to join up, that felt like she was undermining him at the worst possible time. She couldn’t do that to Reggie even if the whole world wanted her to for some reason.
As she moved past those thoughts, Reflecta’s question still weighed on her. If she made the call, then dad would take over this whole thing and she couldn’t help but feel like this would end in another fight. She justified to herself that the morale hit to the team wouldn’t be worth it in the long run so she shook her head.
“No, but I think we need to come up with a strategy,” she decided. “We can’t just bust in there and waltz directly into whatever trap they’ve set up.”
Reflecta nodded but didn’t say anything more. Sarah kind of hated that mask of hers. If Aunt Wave was here, she’d at least tattle on whatever the heroine had thought of that call, secretly whispering it over to her. That thought kind of made Sarah regret not calling in the others. She missed having her whole family together.
Just… get through this year and we’ll take some time away from dad, she thought to herself before organizing a plan.
---------------------------------
Her plan had been a resounding success. Bit had gotten into contact with Arthur Android about other ways into facility and the robot had admitted that there was a secret entrance underground they could use through the sewers. Victory’s underground tunnels were large enough to accommodate giant monsters sloshing around down here, so it was thankfully very easy for Reflecta and her to avoid getting their feet wet, even if the smell was something awful.
Sarah was grateful her powers didn’t come with enhanced senses like Mr. Wonder, but she still wished she had been wearing a full face mask like her partner had been. Thankfully she didn’t have to linger for too long in the smell.
After getting below the warehouse and exiting the sewer proper, the air immediately cleared up. Probably something P.H.O.T.O.N. had whipped up to keep their place from stinking to high heaven. Once they’d made it to an access room with a ladder leading upwards, Reflecta had created a super-hardened mirror which Sarah had flung straight through the hidden manhole in the back of the warehouse, crumpling the metal and sending it flying into the air.
Reflecta immediately manipulated the mirror as best as she could to angle it towards the rest of the room, presumably where the villains would be lying in wait. The fact that hole above seemed to exit into pitch blackness let her know the bastards had been waiting in the dark. No doubt they were using night vision or something. Time to test to see if they’d skimped on that tech. The cheap stuff really didn’t like turning on the brights.
Sarah unleashed her powers, living up to her namesake as she blasted the mirror repeatedly. According to Arthur Android, everything should be stored away in containers tough enough to withstand blasts at thirty percent of her power, so she let the shots fly as quickly as she could form them as her partner swept the mirror back and forth, unleashing a spray of light blasts.
It was hard to hear from down here but she thought she heard cursing and suddenly the lights upstairs flickered on as clearly the villains had abandoned their attempts at stealth. Smiling, Sarah rocketed upwards, ready to kick all their asses.
---------------------------------
Riftmaker dodged out of the way of a flurry of light blasts. Each of the small blasts was like a miniature sun in brightness and immediately left a scorch mark on whatever they impacted. Reflecta tended to go for those big beams that she kept up for a second or two and kind of had a kinetic force to them. That meant this was Sun Light.
Godsdammit, they were using team-up attacks? Fuck!
Riftmaker saw the flying brick with beams explode out of the hole in the ground and come barreling towards them, too low to be caught by the webs hung from the ceiling. He readied his aim from his hiding spot only for his helmet to scream at him about a closer threat.
Orbit shot through the opening, apparently having been waiting for the assault to start. Riftmaker blink-commanded the lasers locked onto him to fire. He’d twisted his body to focus on the back of the warehouse so only two of his mounted emitters could actually get off a shot. Those were still enough to elicit a curse and send the man rolling for cover himself, ending up a row down from Riftmaker rather than right on top of him. Riftmaker quickly jetted backwards to gain room as he tried to swing around the corner and get the drop on the gravity hero first.
They needed to win back the momentum here. The entire point of the ambush was to start things off in their court and to keep the pressure up.
As Riftmaker turned the corner down the central aisle, he saw Reflecta emerge from the same hole that Sun Light had shot out of and immediately the hero pressed forward down the expanse towards the shelves. He fired off a few shots from his gauntlets to try and make things a little less friendly for her while she was moving up (avoiding taking any potshots at the much closer Sun Light and potentially getting her attention), but the distance between them gave the heroine enough time to raise some floating crystalline mirrors to intercept his shots.
He didn’t have time for much more as he finished his turn around the corner into the aisle he previously saw Orbit disappear behind with both his arms forward, ready to fire his gauntlets in concert with his lasers once they got a lock. He was greeted with nothing but empty air between the stacks while his targeting array scanned around wildly. It locked onto something rushing down the next row and Riftmaker used his jets to boost forward just as he felt his stomach abruptly lurch to his right, gravity suddenly shifting in that direction.
He managed to dodge out of the way of both Orbit’s gravity well and the container it had caused to leap from the shelf to his left to slam into another opposite, his quick reaction time being the only thing that kept him from having been pinned by a crate they were there to steal.
He needed to get eyes on Orbit immediately and decided to take to the air, avoiding flying too high to make sure he didn’t end up in Terror’s traps. He quickly threw himself around the corner again, gripping the shelf to help twist around it, just in time to see Orbit ducking around the opposite corner. Riftmaker opted to keep heading down and see if he couldn’t head off the hero with one more row, his blood pumping so hard he could barely hear the voices of his teammates as they all sounded off.
Reflecta had apparently ruined Terror’s ambush and was keeping pressure on her while Turnaround was messing with Sun Light. Meanwhile Sun Light was trying to keep away from Terror for some reason and kept blasting Sand Devil whenever Turnaround let up, preventing the demoness from wrangling the mirror hero. Everyone’s dance partners for this scheme were all jumbled up outside of Riftmaker and Orbit, and he really needed to make sure the gravity hero didn’t suddenly develop the desire to get into the same shuffle so they could hopefully get the plan back on track. Besides Val was about to start opening the hanger doors and Orbit didn’t need to be anywhere near that.
Riftmaker finally caught sight of the gravity hero only to see him pointing a closed fist up at him. It took his brain half a second to remember that Orbit usually activated his powers with an open palm.
Wait, what’s that on his wris-
Alex’s mind exploded into pure white nothingness as pain lanced across his body and he slammed into the shelves, his body having lost control of all motor functions. Fingers of white light were burrowing into him and causing his muscles to seize up.
As he slammed to the floor, Alex recognized the feeling all too well as conscious thought crept back into his skull.
The fucker had just electrocuted him!
“Sorry, but it’s not gonna be so easy,” Orbit told him. “Got an idea a week back thanks to something that happened to a kid called Energy Lad. I got jealous of two other heroes being able to fix a problem and figured it was time to work a little something extra into the suit. You tech villains aren't the only ones who can strap something to your arms to add a little extra punch.”
Riftmaker lurched his arms underneath him as he regained control and glared up at the hero who was pointing a fucking wrist mounted tesla shot right at his face.
The Starlight Squad had fucking upgraded. Worse, they hadn’t stuck to the godsdamn theme.
