I don’t have a reputation for attacking people without warning. If I’ve got a reputation as the Rocket, it’s for the exact opposite.

Rook didn’t see the punch coming. I put as much into it as I could, knowing that his armor could take it and that he’d kill all of us if he could.

It was a solid punch, knocking him backward into the henchrook behind him, forcing them to fall over backwards.

I wasn’t the only one acting either.

Always existing in a world where time ran slower than she’d like, Jaclyn saw that I was punching Rook the moment I started and moved hundreds if not thousands of times faster.

Even better, she thought tactically. Outside of Rook, who was the most dangerous person? Victor and she’d already fought him once today.

Running past Rook while he was flying backward, she punched the henchrook in her way hard enough that he flew out of the group, hitting another on the way out, knocking them both to the ground. The one she hit didn’t get up.

She didn’t stop moving. She ran straight to Victor, hitting him with a punch that threw him out of the group, but not so far or so hard that she couldn’t keep up.

Her next punches threw him further out and then into the ground. She didn’t stop punching him even then—hard punches, the kind that threw chunks of soil and rocks out from under Victor and into the air.

Despite punches that would have smashed tanks and destroyed buildings, Victor didn’t go down. He was still conscious, firing off blasts of purple, some of them beams that burned through tree branches and one of Rook’s henchmen, but others, wider and with a softer glow, must have been teleportation attacks.

At least that was my assumption when one of the branches he’d shot down disappeared into nowhere.

None of them hit Jaclyn and she continued to attack, at one point grabbing Victor’s legs and smashing him repeatedly face first into the ground.

She wasn’t the only one acting either.

Even if they weren’t as fast as Jaclyn, Cassie and Marcus also started moving. Cassie didn’t bother with the closest of Rook’s henchmen, aiming her gun at one of the flying shimmers, dropping him from the air, and turning him visible with the same blast.

He hit the ground with a thump and didn’t get up. She kept on firing, hitting more.

Before Stapledon, Marcus would have morphed into a combat-ready shape and started hitting his opponents. Since Stapledon, he’d worked out subtler options for certain situations.

Shooting forward as a line, he projected himself into the nearest henchrook, covering the powered armor and working his way into the crevices, expanding into them, forcing pieces of armor to split away from each other and fall off.

He paid special attention to their claws which Rook had improved with the same technology as Cassie’s sword. Even as the henchrook tried to claw toward Marcus’ body, the gloves fell apart, followed by the rest of the henchrook’s armor, leaving him in black and grey undergarments.

The man, whose right forearm and lower left leg had been replaced with clawed prosthetics matching Rook’s missing limbs, turned and ran, bits of his powered armor’s exoskeleton still attached and banging against his back.

At the moment, I wasn’t paying attention to anyone else but Rook. I couldn’t run fast enough to keep on punching him as I knocked him backward, but I had bots that could do almost the same thing.

I started with two boombots, aiming one at Rook and the other at the henchrook he’d been blown into, catching both in each other’s blasts. The explosions turned into twin blossoms of fire that blew them away from each other in close, but not parallel lines.

Then I fired off more, pelting them with explosive devices that hit them from all sides, throwing them randomly in every direction, reminding me of fish out of water.

I didn’t seriously expect to take out either of them with boombots, but I was wrong. Either the henchrook had cheaper armor than the original or I’d aimed the bot at a weak spot.

Either way, even though all of the henchrook’s armor stayed on, the blasts dented the sides of his armor, leaving it pockmarked. The henchrook didn’t move again.

Rook hit the ground hard, scraping his armor against a cluster of rocks, and pushing himself up to aim his prosthetic arm at me only to find that whatever futuristic weapon he’d built into it was missing. Only a quarter of the barrel remained, the casing had been blasted open, and wires and a circuit board hung partly out, still sparking.

When he pulled the damaged arm in to inspect it, he found that the claw under the gun was also missing. It may have been my imagination, but in addition to oil and other fluids, I thought I saw blood.

Could I possibly have blown up Rook’s other hand? Maybe I’d blown up the prosthetic a second time.

I couldn’t see Rook’s face but saw his helmet turn toward the unmoving henchrook. It may be that in that moment he realized that even though he’d come to kill me, I might be willing to kill him too.

“Victor,” he shouted, his voice squeaking with some emotion. It might have been anger, but it might have been panic.