Wasp

Tonight was wasting no time in going to hell in a hand basket.

I could hear the faint tones of a lot of sirens in the distance and they were getting closer with each passing moment. Smoke created plumes of grey against the night sky in places and the fiery explosions were just a part of Coil's attack.

At the very end of the block another kind of detonation had taken place. Instead of fire the buildings and people were shredded and punctured, as if from a frag grenade or claymore. Another type of bomb had left most of the structure pristine but the people horribly burned and convulsing like an overpowered taser. Coil has a Tinker, I remembered. This could be worse. But it isn't.

Why?

Behind me Emma made a little noise. "The fuck?"

"Still think we did this?" I asked. I didn't wait for her to answer. "You should leave." I had fallen into that numb, overwhelmed state again. I was able to recognize that I was likely offloading my emotions onto my bugs but the mechanics of it escaped me. It couldn't be healthy, for me or my bugs but I was glad for it. Beating deep was a white hot rage that grew with every step I took and burned at the back of my throat.

I had already decided. When I found Coil, I would let go of my bugs. I would let the Brown Recluses, the Black Widows, the Asian giant hornets make him regret living.

Oni Lee angled his teleporting jumps towards my location and eventually popped onto the rooftop above us dressed for war with a pistol already in his hand. Emma proved to be just as aware of his reputation as I was when she took several steps back. Her 'swords' dissolved until she was shrouded completely. I dismissed her. Not worth my attention.

"You are needed." Oni Lee said. His voice was as dusty as his clones.

I continued moving my bugs through the buildings and searching for survivors. Crickets that I had crawled onto Peter directed him to any I found. They weren't very good in heat, cockroaches were better but we developed a system where he pointed at a house, apartment complex or building: if the bugs were silent, the search came up with nothing but corpses.

My crickets hadn't made a noise for the past four buildings. I didn't know any first aid. I was not sure what to do with the bleeding bodies and puncture wounds. I directed my spiders towards wrapping as many injuries in spider silk as I could while avoiding human squeamishness. I'd lost a fair number of my swarm that way.

"Lung?" I asked for confirmation.

I found a kid pinned underneath a man's body and bleeding heavily. One block, maybe two to the east. My heart leapt in my throat as I made the mental switch to the crickets. Then he stopped breathing. My crickets screamed and Peter bolted but it was too late. I -

There could be no justice for this. Only revenge.

"I'm coming," I said. I wasn't sure what I was thinking. That I needed to get away? I was doing what I could. And it wasn't enough. I needed to breathe. "Bao has prisoners. They work for Coil."

How was Bao taking this? He was out of my range so I couldn't check up on him but I could only imagine how badly this was going to shake him. I could easily recall how he had shut down after hearing about the first bombing. This was at least a hundred times worse.

Oni Lee twisted his head in the direction I indicated. "Understood." He turned back to me. "Come."

Lung's lieutenant lead me through areas that were just as bad off as the ones I'd came from. There were untouched neighborhoods but it felt like they were far and few in between. How long had Coil been planning this? How was he able to plant all these bombs? Without anyone knowing?

Then I considered just how neglected the Docks were, from abandoned warehouses empty apartment complexes. Coil had fingers in the PRT pie, did I really think buying gang members off to look the other way was hard for someone like that? It wouldn't even have to be gang members. There were plenty of down on their luck dock workers that wouldn't ask questions about a job. Thinking that made my stomach clench. He had the Undersiders rob Lung. For all I knew, that could have been the distraction for setting this up.

Game, set, match.

My bugs felt the beginnings of a wind current long before I saw Lung. It was somewhat like what I imagined being in a wind tunnel would be like. The closer we got to our destination the stronger the push and pull was to the point that it picked up light pieces of trash and set it scattering across the pavement. The temperature was rising along with the volume of a low growl that rattled my chest cavity.

The inhale whooshed past my ears and the air pressure made it hard to breathe until the exhale that pushed against us. Forget the refurbished warehouse, dragon murals and rice paper walls. This dirty alley was the entrance to the dragon's lair.

I had ducked around a fire escape when the Oni Lee in front of me dissolved to ash. I saw Kali slumped against a fire extinguisher, the singing of her vibrating metal shards drowned out by the rumble. I saw Snake with a blood flecked bandage on her hand and not smiling.

I saw Lung.

Her scales were the color of tarnished silver rippling up and down her form in triangular shaped ridges. Her legs were long and muscular and angled like the ones on a lizard tipped with obsidian claws. She was long, stretched out almost and there was nothing human left in her face. A two part jaw that snarled and horns that jutted out and back from the top of her head, shoulders and shorter, sharp spikes down her back.

Lung was at least twenty feet tall and dominating the street. The surroundings themselves were familiar even in the darkness. I slipped into some ants to make sure. The smell was the same. This was where Jing Wen lived, Noriko's mom. I looked towards the building I thought was hers. It was somewhat intact..

The front door was broken in as if someone had kicked it down and was hanging limply off its hinges. I swept the building with a few moths, expecting the worst. Her apartment still had the dragon fan above the door. That one was broken too. The apartment itself was completely empty. The elderly woman herself nowhere to be found. Where would she go? And why?

The doors were broken. She didn't leave, she was taken.

I felt like I was missing something incredibly obvious just then.

In front of me the dragon reared up and inhaled.

A warm breeze, so hot it was stifling swept past me. The heat built in the middle until it felt like I was standing in an oven, complete with the smell of smoke and dustings of ash. It wasn't until I looked up to the skyline and saw the plumes of smoke bending in our direction and shrinking that I realized Lung could do more than create fire.

I was standing in the presence of the one who shielded cities from Behemoth, grappled with Leviathan and faced down the Simurgh. Comparatively, Lung's human form was weak. This was why I feared Lung the first night I met her. You don't fight Lung with bugs. You don't fight Lung, period.

She dropped her head to my level and stared at me through one eye bigger than my head. Lung's eyes were still brown but enlarged like this and up close like I was I could see all of the in between colors on the scales of her iris. Green, orange, some yellow and darker streaks of black. The slitted pupil was rimmed with gold and I could see myself in it.

"You put out the fires," I croaked. My throat and tongue were dry from the heat radiating off her.

"'ow 'e pu' out lives." Lung rumbled. The spark of flame she always had around her head had multiplied like a swarm of fireflies. She worked her jaws and crushed the concrete beneath her feet. "Where. Is. Coil?"

"Whoa, wait, Coil.?" Kali grunted as she painfully stood up. "What does that two-bit fuck have to do with this? What about the Empire?"

"Irrelevant." Snake countered. She looked at me then with her lips pressed together until they were bloodless and looked up at the building behind me. "Company."

Lung's jaws parted as she sniffed the air. It was easy to tell the moment she caught a whiff of something she didn't like because her scales surged. They split apart into seams as she shot up another few feet. She spun in the opposite direction of where Snake was looking. "Aswang." She snarled.

Oni Lee collapsed into ash and popped up again on top of an abandoned truck. Kali barked out a laugh. "By himself?"

No. Not by himself.

"East," I said. Through the eyes of my moths I saw the man. He had ratty sneakers on and brightly colored pants, the kind that would be part of a prison uniform. No shirt, instead his chest and arms were tattooed with grotesque faces and covering his own face was a bone white mask shaped like a grimly smiling skull. Aswang, one of Lung's lieutenants.

Lisa had said he was in PRT custody, and that was all I needed to remember to know what he was doing here.

Trailing behind him was a man in bulky armor and square mask carrying a small bag.

Aswang announced his arrival roaring a few words triumphantly. Only a few, because Lung cut him off by launching down the street wreathed in flame intent on ripping him apart. He shifted and a gigantic doglike spectre with two heads met Lung in the middle. The man with the bag fired a small object from his hand just as the two smashed into each other. It was metallic and a red light blinked on it once before it detonated against Lung's side.

Oni Lee tossed a grenade of his own as Kali ripped a manhole cover out of the ground.

The explosion twisted in a strange way and when it cleared I could see a hole bored through her scales. Her blood steamed and frothed. Acid. Lung screamed and turned into a wild thrashing animal. She turned on herself with her claws to scrape and gouge her own skin out around the wound. Aswang took advantage of this. Both heads tore into Lung's neck and shoulder and they fell together against a building.

I'd seen her shatter a hand on brick to make a foothold. She was shot, twice and barely acknowledged it. This was the first time I'd ever seen Lung in pain.

Out of the corner of my eye, Snake lunged towards me. "Hachi - "

There was a sudden pull.

I had a brief moment of disorientation before I stopped listening to what my brain was trying to tell me and started taking note of my swarm. Above my dragonflies, lower than my moths. My hornets had already located me. Roof. In front of me was a man with a dark costume with a red mask and top hat like he escaped from a circus.

I was grabbed from behind with my arms immediately pulled back and pinned. Some kind of watery creature was at the other end of the rooftop.

Top hat's mouth was moving. I didn't understand a word he said. I didn't want to.

Enemy.

My swarm descended.

Enemy.

Consider the dragonfly. Its large compound eyes make up the majority of its head mass giving it an almost perfect 360 degree vision. They were amazing fliers, capable of maneuvers like flying backwards or upside down. They also have a near perfect mechanism for predicting the movements of prey.

Enemy.

The light was wrong. It was too dark to be hunting. The air was heavy with smoke. The fine particles of ash irritated my eyes. Consider the mosquito. They didn't mind it. It was just dark enough and several had young to feed. I shifted one set of instincts for another. The smell of salt, fatty residue, iron. The feeling of heat and plumes of gas that living things exhale. The rooftop bloomed in silhouettes close to me, and shades further out. Air currents flowed around objects, mapping them out.

I layered it with the blue-purple tones of the dragonflies' ultraviolet sight.

Enemy.

Consider the spider. Territorial, easily threatened. Patient. The bristles on my legs were hypersensitive to movement. The origin of, the direction it was heading in. I clung to folds of cloth and substituted it for my webs. I stood still and just felt.

Enemy.

Consider the hornet.

I found the flesh of wrists and hands and neck and stung. I jerked forward as my captor spasmed, gasping. I attacked his mouth, lighting behind the teeth and stinging gums, tongue, cheek as I fell to the ground. I felt a faraway sensation of rough gravel and brick and then ignored it. A few of me died as the captor's teeth gnashed in response but I did not care. Intruders. Trespassers. Invaders.

Enemy.

I rushed the exposed skin of Top Hat's face. He backed away, screaming. For the smaller, weaker hive it was a suicide run. Pulling back from the sting ripped out their abdomens, left behind organs and entrails but the others could sting and sting and sting again. Top Hat choked on mosquitos and black flies, wretching and then-

-he was elsewhere. The floor rippled with the vibrations of something large and heavy and I heard the snarls as the beast straightened from its short fall. I remembered meeting a creature like it before, several nights ago. A monstrous dog covered in thick fur and bone sheaths. I split my attention. Top Hat was escaping. I knew where he had gone. He had not gone far enough. The chemical trails were wafting in the air. I pulled most back to hover over me protectively, but the guards that had his scent would not let him go so easily.

The man that had grabbed me had fallen to the floor and was curling himself into a ball. The hive was blocked, stinging cloth and hide ineffectively. He was hiding his face and hands. Consider the centipede. Agile, flexible, small enough to fit into the tight spaces. The gap between pant leg and sock.

I felt more than heard the sharp, hypersonic pitch of a dog whistle.

The beast leapt forward and my swarm rose to meet it. The soft spaces, the seams that split open on its skin I tore and rent with mandibles until it bled. I crashed into the eyes, stung the inside of its mouth. The creature barked and went into a frenzy, shaking its head to dislodge me.

Movement. The watery creature coiled like a spring, and then lunged. Fast. It barreled towards me on the heels of the dog. Then it was in front. I split my forces again, rushing. Biting, stinging.

Nothing but water. I was drowning.

Panic.

I pulled in more to supplement my numbers, called back the hive guards. Protect the queen!

It wasn't working.

The thing splashed over Captor, washing his body of me. I was crushed against the gravel, ground to pieces. I lost limbs, thoraxes, heads. Flickers of existence snuffed out. It rose as a tidal wave, smelling of brine and crashed down as a solid block of water. I formed a wall with everything I had. I already knew it wouldn't be enough. Moments before impact.

A blade of metal stabbed down, crunching deep into the earth as it split the wave in two.

Ally? Wary.

It reformed quickly, quick enough to spook me. Restless. I knew water. Water did not move like that. Water did not act like that. Not water. Not water.

"The fuck do we have here?" Kali rose like a multi-armed thing, blades of metal hovering around her as the queen of her own hive. Another blade lashed out and speared the dog creature through the chest. It thrashed, bleeding copiously and staining the air with the smell of iron. The frantic movements of an animal knowing it was about to die. "Trash."

The sentient water swirled away from me, back to guard its teammate. Kali glanced at me. Her expression was hidden behind her two faced mask just as mine was behind my own. I chose the small gnat to settle on her unobtrusively. Her smell was repugnant, oily. It was strongest near her metal.

"Ballsy trash."

It was now two against two. I knew I couldn't hurt something made of water, and had a feeling that Kali couldn't either. But we could definitely hurt that ass that had grabbed me. It seemed to realize that, uncoiling.

A second later, a large potted plant was swaying where the man had been. Two against one.

Top Hat.

My swarm hummed with anger. The urge to hunt the enemy down burned.

Another blade whistled through the air and the water moved, sliding around. My dragonflies followed the motion, how the water bunched up in certain spots as 'limbs' for its momentum. The gravel beneath it rolled with its weight. The stones were left only slightly damp. It was flexible, but not a single drop of water was out of place. I followed the trajectory of the metal blade. A clean miss. It crashed to the rooftop with a discordant clang to the backdrop of a muted 'whump' and new plumes of smoke on the horizon.

"Not Empire," Kali mused. "Kaiser parades every parahuman he gets. We'd have known about you."

I opened my mouth. My tongue felt like it was a sodden cotton swab and my cheeks were weighed down with lead. "Top Hat," I managed to gasp out. I wrestled back control of my mouth. I felt tired. I was exhausted and a headache was ramming the bridge of my nose.

Kali glanced at me again. "Oh yeah? Where's sun bitch then?"

The thing surged. It bulldozed through the swarm, shrugging off my every, desperate attempt. It latched onto me with an almost crushing grip, scooping me up on a mad rush to the end of the roof. I could hear Kali shout. I was being kidnapped by a fucking water monster and I was hoping she wasn't about to launch a dozen metal blades after it. We launched into the air and landed heavily on an adjacent roof. The fastest fliers of my swarm caught up quickly, pulling up alongside to bite, sting, trying to cause damage, to cause pain.

Another jump, and I pulled back to mark my surroundings. I noted the position of the moon and stars, the buildings around us. Consider the ant. Capable of navigating large distances solely by the smell of food, or other ants. I laid down the trail patiently as the thing's loping gait ate up distance. We were heading south and east.

Why me? In a group consisting of Snake, Oni Lee and Kali, why would they go after me? Because I was the least troublesome cape there? Did they know what my power was before hand? How?

In the middle of a jump, there was a slight breeze. It killed dozens of me and the thing burst apart.

I was airborne. The first instinct I pulled on, was to fly. Muscles in my back twitched. No wings. I slammed into the rooftop. My ankle rolled underneath me, sending me sprawling across fake grass and smooth pebbles. I pushed myself up to my knees as soon as I got my breath back.

The watery projection? Cape? It pulled itself together and a woman in sweatpants and a black sword in her hand was there to meet it. She vanished from my sight with a flash of black, and it burst once more. The third time, it collapsed into a large puddle of water.

The woman held her sword out towards the water, tense as if she was daring it to reform. When it didn't, I could see her shoulders start to shake.

"Nabiki?" I rasped. Whatever else she or I might have said was drowned out by a crash like a thousand car pileup, and Lung's roar. More sirens started wailing and I recognized the loud sound from roughly four years ago when Lung had first arrived in Brockton Bay. The Endbringer alarms.

I could see Lung, towering above the buildings just like on the news channel. A giant silvery serpent with hundreds of flames around her like a cloud of fireflies. But this time it wasn't Behemoth. It wasn't the Simurgh. There was no Leviathan.

Something was wrong with Lung. Her scales were tarnished with dark blood. Thick rivers from wounds I could see even from here. Her fireflies were winking out one by one. The serpent swayed, unsteady as the two headed dog leapt on it.

The heroes were coming. I thought. They had to be. More than just the local Brockton Bay Protectorate. They'd lost against Lung four years ago and I was sure they didn't want to lose anyone else fighting villains this time. My throat burned. I needed to get closer.

"Find Bao." It wasn't an order, not really. I didn't even know if Nabiki understood English at all. I only knew how to count to ten in Japanese.

"Go!" I bit out. Nabiki gazed calmly at me. The she nodded. She was gone in a flicker of black. I looked around. I was on a private patio complete with a water fountain and a mini golf course. I hauled myself to my feet and went to the fountain. I pulled my mask up just enough to let me splash a handful of ice cold water into my face. I focused on the feeling of cold water slipping down my collar and down my back.

Breathe, Taylor.

Too close. I'd been too close to losing myself in my bugs. I couldn't let that happen again. I pulled my mask back into place and looked behind me at the puddle of water. It was still. I left it.

There was a two part fire escape on my side of the building. I climbed down and flared my swarm around me in a sphere. I refused to get caught off guard again. I took off at a half jog, limping. My ankle didn't hurt as much as it could have, just enough to let me know it was injured.

I got to a good place on the edge of Chester and Peach. From above I could see that another block and I'd be neck deep in rubble. Everything was loud. I could hear Lung fighting. It sounded like two mountains colliding. I circled the condominium and found the fire escape. I scrambled up and could feel the raised grid of the stairs bite into my feet through the soft soles of my costume. I stopped on the last landing just below the lip of the roof. From my new vantage point, I could see the battle between two behemoths with my own two eyes. And it was exactly as I'd feared.

Lung was slowing down.

Aswang flitted in and out, leaping in from the ground, from the buildings around them. He struck at anything he could get a hold on before disengaging to sink into the scenery again. Hit and run. Guerrilla warfare. From the man who boldly walked up to Lung with a challenge, it seemed almost out of character. Or perhaps even he knew that he couldn't really go toe to toe with Lung for very long. He always broke off before pulling his disappearing act and he always waited until he was completely out and in the open before attacking.

If I had his power, why expose myself like that at all? Reach an arm out of the wall to rake Lung across the face then pull it back in before she found purchase. Maybe that just wasn't his style, but I was suspected that he couldn't. All or nothing.

It was nothing right now. Lung's head swayed back and forth like a cobra, searching.

The surface of a building rippled slightly, like a pebble dropped into a pond. The claws were first, silently piercing through the brick followed by thick muscled forearms. Aswang's snarling faces burst out of the glass.

"Behind you!" I cried out. I was over half a block away, there was no way she could -

Lung turned on a dime and met him head on.

Maybe she could.

I covered the surface of every building in range with my bugs as a crude early warning system. Getting close to the fight would be suicide, but if there was one thing I could do, that was it. The second he emerged, I would know.

One of the buildings my bugs settled on was occupied. I could hear the people inside through the vibrations of the glass.

"Wait, wait! There's people in there!"

Lung twisted with Aswang in her grip. I saw it before it happened. I screamed out as if that would stop it. With a brutal heave, Lung slammed Aswang into the building. The family inside cried out even louder, hoarse and disbelieving. Then the wall collapsed in, bringing down the edge of the roof onto the giant dog. Lung bore her flames down on him until he recovered, and slipped from her grasp like water. He sunk into the building silently.

For a long moment, he didn't reappear. Lung snarled and lashed out, berserk, tearing into every building around her like she could force him to materialize. My bugs died in droves as bundles of confused impulses, half of them feeling the heat and others attracted to the light they used to navigate.

I stood there on the fire escape.

Lung was still bleeding heavily, enough to have killed her several times over if she'd been human sized. She was shrinking. At first I thought I imagined it, but she was getting smaller. Instead of forty feet, she was about thirty and change now. A few minutes later and she was only twenty feet long. Aswang still hadn't made a reappearance.

Everything clashed together into a nauseating cocktail in the pit of my stomach. Where was he? What was he planning? Lung killed them. They'd been screaming for help, and it hadn't mattered. There were few things that could survive having a building collapse on them. Fewer still that could survive that and Lung's flames. My bugs hadn't. It would not be a stretch to assume the people hadn't either.

This block had escaped the bombing nearly unscathed. The wreckage that was there now, the bodies. That was all Lung.

I climbed down off the fire escape and took off at a jog. I told myself that I wanted to find any lucky survivors. I told myself that I could use my swarm to find Aswang because he couldn't have gotten far. What I really wanted to do was reach Lung. I didn't know what I would do when I got there.

My mind was racing faster than my feet were.

Lung slipped out of my natural sight, so I sent bugs ahead to make up for it.

I turned the corner and clumsily crawled across a parked car. Despite having never been in this part of town before in my life, I knew where to go. It was almost an instinct, or a reflex. The last known location of my bugs were ingrained in my mind. All I had to do was follow the path they had left. The vantage points was different, but the tastes and smells were the same.

The first street that turned in that direction was a dead end. Half a building had fallen into the street. Arachnids and insects could climb or fly over but I couldn't. The next street was relatively clear so I took it.

The street here was flooded. A fire hydrant either Lung or Aswang had stepped on was spewing water out of its top. The water was covered with a rainbow film of grease.

My dragonflies found them first. A man covered in tattoos of warped faces cracking a woman's head against a wall. She stumbled and slung a vicious right hook into his jaw. He shook it off and grabbed her. He laughed as she struggled against him. I couldn't hear what was being said. It was all just sound to my bugs and there was a lot of sound. The roar of fire, the buildings falling apart, the sirens wailing. The Filipino changer was blocking my view of Lung's face, but her movements were desperate. He threw her to the ground, then pinned her.

No.

A dark cloud fell on him, biting and stinging everything they could touch. I didn't care for the complete topological map my bugs gave me of his body, so I ignored it. He was out of his changer form and preoccupied. He was vulnerable. I didn't bother holding back and felt no remorse. Aswang roared with pain, rising up with his head already turning to see who dared.

Lung chose that moment.

There was a flash. Little more than a spark, really. It went in just behind Aswang's right temple, and came out the other side.

He paused. His head cocked like he had heard something before his face slackened and he toppled over. He hit the ground hard and didn't move.

I got there just in time for Lung to struggle to her feet.

Her black hair was long and matted with blood and dust. Her neck was torn on the right side as a ripped flap of skin plastered to welling blood. An even uglier wound had bored into her side. She was covered in cuts, each one of them sluggishly bleeding. She looked like she was in her mid twenties, maybe thirties if I pushed my estimates and quietly pretty. A small mole was at the end of her left eyebrow and her face was heart shaped. Large dark eyes and a small mouth, and one of the few women I met who stood almost dead even with my height. She didn't have a stitch of clothing on her.

She didn't have her mask. I recognized her. Noriko.

Noriko was Lung.

For a long time, I felt like my brain had simply stopped working. It had been Lung at the bus stop the next day with her mother, pointing out the burned ends of my hair. She'd known. It had been Lung that showed me the garden with the Kyushu memorial. Lung had driven me to Parian for my scarf. Yuka was friends with Lung, and she had no idea. Lung had been there in Amy's hospital room listening to us.

Noriko was Lung. I felt sick to my stomach. I kept running over the times with Noriko, viewing everything through new lenses. Lung had acted so surprised when Snake had first brought me to her office, as if she hadn't already known who I was. The Asian hornets, and the comment that Dad had helped her with her car. The flashes of amusement on Noriko's face when she told me Lung trusted her judgement. The inside jokes I hadn't got.

Lung had a terrible sense of direction and liked listening to the oldies. She drank imported tea and wore designer clothes. One giant fucking lie.

I got played for the biggest idiot on the face of the planet. If tonight hadn't happened the way it did, no one would have known any better. She'd have gotten away with it. Like she'd gotten away with it for years.

I couldn't – I couldn't handle this. Bile was creeping up the back of my throat that I swallowed back down as I took a few steps back. I couldn't even stand to look at her. I had to look at something else.

Up close, the apartment building was even more of a wreck. The wall Lung had tossed Aswang through was completely demolished. The floor above it was crumpling, the concrete base had snapped in half and was hanging down. The only thing that kept it from sliding all the way was the thick twisted steel cables that had been embedded in the concrete. The entire complex was groaning like it was in pain. Glass, brick, mortar and other debris covered the street in a thick layer. I didn't have to send my bugs in to check. I could see a human hand and forearm sticking out of the rubble. It was chalky with concrete dust and it didn't move.

"You killed them." Saying it out loud seemed to make everything more real. I could almost taste the drywall and broken steel on my tongue. I felt numb. "You killed them."

She acted like she hadn't heard me, but I knew she did. She heard me when I was half a block away. She sure as hell could hear me now.

"You're a fucking piece of shit, Lung." I licked my lips. "Or should I say, Noriko?"

Lung blinked. Her hand came up and felt her face and the lack of Lung's customary metal dragon mask. Between her fingers I could see her lips twitch. She shook her head as if in denial. Then she started laughing.

I saw red. I didn't have to give my swarm a conscious order or direction. It simply rose as an extension of me, humming loud enough to be a growl. Lung was not getting taller. She wasn't growing stronger. The bored hole in her side was leaking dark blood and clear fluid. The flesh was knitting slowly over the bones of her ribcage. Too slowly. The bite Aswang had taken out of her neck was weeping rivers. She was unsteady on her feet and her eyes were bloodshot. Bruises were flowering purple on her skin. This was the great Lung, she who fought Endbringers. Any two bit thug could take her now.

All it would take was one good shot, and she would be done. My bugs exploded forwards.

It was a repeat of the first night I had met Lung. The first wave of my insects died abruptly in a swirling flash of flame. When the fire cleared, it was clear that I had finally gotten her attention. Her lip was slightly curled and brows furrowed with slight contempt. That more than anything reminded me of the futility of it all. You do not fight Lung with bugs.

I didn't care anymore.

Even knowing what Lung was normally capable of, it still caught me by surprise. A thin white hot ribbon lashed against my right thigh like a whip. From every angle, it looked like it barely touched me. That was all Lung needed.

Everything went white, then my entire leg bloomed in searing agony that dwarfed the worst pain I had ever felt. My leg gave out and I went down screaming. The pavement was rough and warm. I desperately turned, the half-forgotten stop, drop and roll echoing in my head like a gong. The best I could manage was flopping onto my stomach with my hips still twisted upwards in an attempt to keep my leg still. I wasn't on fire. I had been burned.

My fingers scrabbled at the ground as I tried to force myself beyond the pain. I tried to focus on something else, anything else but every heartbeat sent a wave of agony. I found myself thinking of Kazuo lying on a stained wooden floor with his throat burned shut. As if drawn by the memory, several of my moths landed near me. The rest of the swarm just buzzed.

I could barely hear the sound of bare feet on warm pavement over the blood rushing through my ears. I bit the inside of my cheek, tasting iron as more of my swarm died to fire.

Lung reached down and with contemptuous ease hauled me up. The burn flared and I bit back the scream. Heat seemed to radiate from my thigh all the way up to my head, but the tips of my fingers were going numb. Shock.

"Do not do that again," she said casually. Like she was just commenting on the fucking weather. "Your only warning."

She was holding me up with one hand. Hadn't she been struggling against Aswang earlier? I knew the answer even as I asked the question. She'd been faking it. Her healing was impaired and possibly her ability to be a dragon, but everything else? She exaggerated. Played it up. She noticed the same thing I had. Aswang could only be tangible or intangible. No in between. She manipulated him into thinking he had her right where he wanted her. Gave him a reason to be out of his changer form, and incapable of going intangible.

She gave him a victim and he fell for it. I fell for it. It was all lies with her, wasn't it?

"Look around you," I rasped. Black was creeping in on the edges of my vision. I don't know what I was thinking at the time. Maybe I was attempting to appeal to my own delusion in hopes that it had ever existed. "The island is sinking. And you haven't learned a God. Damned. Thing."

A blank, disinterested expression stole over her face. That was her only reaction.

She was Madison, who looked pretty and lied expertly. She was Sophia, using her physical strength and threat of violence to get ahead. She was Emma, getting close under the guise of friendship for her own sick amusement. A bully.

That was all Lung was.

In spite of it all, I grinned. When an Asian Giant Hornet stung, it left behind a chemical trail that told other hornets to sting the same target. They would travel up to sixty miles from their hive in pursuit of prey. All it took was one.

My hornet settled lightly on Lung's bare ass. Sting, I thought and let the darkness finally carry me away.