Madison blinked the smoke from her eyes, feet already lifting from the ground as the fear welling behind her ribs compelled her upward and outward. She saw the scene unfolding beneath her: the row of ruined vehicles snaking through the standstill traffic, the crowds of people tumbling from their vehicles, fleeing the city on foot now that fleeing it by car was no longer an option. Just beneath her, Victor was being held aloft by his throat, in the claws of a grimy man in a ruined jumpsuit.

  "Let him go!"

  A whipcrack bolt of electricity jabbed out from behind a debris pile and caromed harmlessly off of the man. Dylan followed it, leaping high and wide, already charging another blast when Victor raised his hand and sent him flying harmlessly away with a wave of energy.

  "Get out of here!" Victor choked out. "Run! Ru-"

  The man in the jumpsuit dropped Victor and kicked him in the chest, a casual-looking punt of a kick right into his solar plexus. What followed was probably the loudest sound Madison had heard in her life and a shockwave that sent her spiraling upwards into the air, body tumbling over and over.

  By the time she'd righted herself, Victor and the intruder were already far off, a trail of smoke and flying rubble tracing their path as the man tossed Victor through overpasses and buildings. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps, her hands shaking. Her power was all in knots, her instincts folded in over themselves, causing her to jerk back and forth in the air.

  "Maddy!"

  Madison squinted down, was just able to make out the image of Hazel peeking out from around a concrete divider. The girl waved, firmly, with both hands.

  "Maddy, get out of here! Go!"

  "Where? I don't-" Madison coughed. "I don't have anywhere else to go!"

  "Back to the motel! We'll meet you-" Dylan and Flo materialized at Hazel's side, each lugging one of their battery backpacks. "We'll meet you when this is over."

  "Where are you going?"

  Dylan leaned over, said something inaudible directly into Hazel's ear. Flo's head was turned toward the explosive din of the fight playing out in the city behind them, face pained. Madison felt a wave of dread wash over her, looking at them.

  "Don't go after him!" Madison pleaded. "Whoever this guy is, he's- He's too strong for us. Victor told you to run!"

  "He probably is," Hazel said, smiling sadly up at her. "But we can't just leave. Victor's our dad."

  And then Hazel had her pack over her shoulder, and all three were gone, blurring off the highway and into the city, toward the faraway chaos. And before she had a chance to think better of it, Madison was flying after them.

  In a minute she had caught up to the fight, was hovering close enough to make out the scene below her. Victor and the man had crashed through the wall of the city's baseball stadium, and Victor was being pinned by the man, who had a knee on his throat. The man was talking in an odd, thin voice, and was raining blows down on Victo'rs head after every few words, as punctuation. Madison recalled the lessons Flo had helped her with, about how to catch sounds in the air with her Aura and boost them, to listen to things normally too soft or faraway to hear.

  "-strong, man. Scary strong," the man was saying. Then wham, a fist to the head so hard that the stadium rumbled, its foundations groaning, advertisements and signage clattering from walls, glass in the box seats shattering. The turf-covered ground beneath them was a cratered wreck, growing deeper with each impact. "And you're not even like me. You can't even-" WHAM "Do the healing trick. Can't even-" WHAM "Pull more energy from the other place. You're stuck with the basic kit, man, and-" WHAM "I'm barely making progress!"

  Victor raised his hand, planted it on the man's throat, and let loose with a rapid-fire burst of so many different forms of energy in a row that Madison failed utterly to identify them. The blast had the effect of a rapid series of random fireworks: white light, bang, heat, light, smoke, bam, electricity, blue light, hiss, force. The man reeled a little, his jaw and throat scorched and smoking, and rattled with a laugh.

  "Like, like that, that trick. The, what do you say in English, the grab-bag. The a-little-of-everything. It's a classic trick, everyone knows how to do it, but you do it so MUCH that it kinda works!" The man crowed with laughter, WHAM, hit Victor again. Madison could see that Victor's nose was ruined, could just make out a thin sludge of blood coating his lower lip and chin. "You need to tell me your name, man, so I remember you better after you're dead."

  Victor spat something, inaudible even to Madison's heightened hearing, and the man frowned.

  "Rude. That's rude. Let me ask again." The man leaned back, placed a hand on his chest. Victor took the opportunity to level another massive blow, thunderous and earth-shaking, to his chest, and the man barely budged. "My name's Qiang. What's your name?"

  Victor clapped his hand on the side of Qiang's head, and a new energy Madison had never sensed before hissed into being, bypassing the man's defenses entirety at first, singeing the hair off of his skull and turning the skin black in a distinctive handprint. Qiang whipped his head away, briefly troubled, before the skin began to grow back.

  Madison felt her stomach turn at the sight. Healing like that, it wasn't something she'd ever seen Victor do. It wasn’t something she’d seen anyone do.

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  Qiang scowled down at Victor. “You’re rude. I don’t like that.”

  And with that, he grabbed Victor by the ankle and flung him up and out, sending his body careening into the scoreboard, which snapped in half and crashed down. Qiang paused, frowned down at his arm, flexed his hand, which was burned in that same odd way where he’d grabbed him.

  “What did you-” Qiang began, before Victor arced back over the edge of the stadium and slammed into him, knocking him away, digging a furrow into the outfield as he skidded.

  “Oh, okay, okaaay, I get it,” Qiang said, rising to his feet. “You sucked a bunch of the energy I used to throw you up into your Qi right when I tossed you. That’s why you didn’t go as far as I’d like. That’s where you’re getting the energy to-”

  Qiang was interrupted by the crash-fwoom of a portable propane heater, flung at him fast enough to scream through the air before impact. The tank detonated on the man, dousing him in inky flames. Qiang seemed barely perturbed, even as the flesh bubbled and fell from him like rendered meat. “-to do stuff like that. You’re just taking my stuff and throwing it back at me. Like- oh, what is it called. It’s that fight sport from Japan.”

  Qiang held one flaming arm up to his eyes, squinted into the outfield. “Where’d you go?”

  He was answered by a roaring bolt of electricity, thick as a bolt of lightning, arcing down to him from where Victor stood at the top of one of the stadium’s flood lights. Qiang stumbled away, the flesh from his right arm completely gone, revealing an oddly iridescent shank of bone beneath.

  Victor landed, then, a ten-foot chunk of rebar in one hand like a spear. He thrust it through Qiang’s torso, pinned him to the ground. Then he danced around, far too fast for Madison to follow, raining blow after blow on the man, hammering him in further, scalding and shocking and melting him with each hit.

  Qiang let out a little gurgling cry with each impact, sounding more and more distressed, and Madison felt her heart leap with hope for a moment. Victor was a cloud of violence, a blurring streak of energy, moving faster and hitting harder than Madison had ever seen anything move and hit. It was beautiful, in a sickening sort of way, the violence this peaceful, fatherly man was capable of.

  Then, Victor re-appeared in her view, frozen mid-air above the smoking wreck of Qiang’s body. A skeletal arm, green and black and oily-slick, had shot from the lump of destroyed flesh and clamped on Victor’s throat, catching him mid-air.

  “Judo,” Qiang croaked, his voice barely recognizable. His body was already re-forming, the flames snuffing out, the patches of blackened skin turning back into their smooth tan, ropes of muscle coiling back around his exposed bone.

  Victor grunted, gasped, pulled at the now fully-fleshed hand that held him fast in place.

  “One of those- one of those grappling sports,” Qiang hissed. His other hand came up to join the first, palmed Victor’s face, forced him to his knees before Qiang.

  “It’s not as cool as boxing, I think,” he rambled. “The grappling sports. But maybe, I’m thinking, maybe, it’s what I gotta use on you. Because I know- I know better than anyone. A punch is one thing. But pressure? The kinda pressure you find in the ocean, in the dark water? That’s what gets ya.”

  Qiang placed both of his hands around Victor’s head, one thumb on each of his eyes, his fingers claws on the back of his skull. The he started to squeeze.

  Victor screamed, high and long, a scream Madison hadn’t ever imagined could come from him. A scream she knew, sickened, that she’d remember in pitch-perfect detail forever.

  Victor placed his palms against Qiang’s head, pushing, warding, and let loose with a jet of steam so massive that it blasted up and through the seats, melting chairs all the way up into the nosebleeds, venting dozens of feet above the stadium’s rim.

  The steam, whatever it was, blackened Qiang’s flesh like the odd burns from before, stripped the skin from his face, leaving a grinning, shimmering skull beneath.

  Qiang remained unmoved. The muscles on his arms jumped and wriggled as his grip tightened. Victor was desperately draining the kinetic energy from the pressure, turning it into more of the steam, but some was leaking through, and it was cracking him. The thumbs were finding their way into his eyes, the fingers cutting half-moons into his head.

  The skin on Qiang’s neck was gone now. His torso was melting. His fleshless face was still grinning.

  Victor’s scream got higher, then thinner, frantic and then pained and then mournful. And then quiet.

  The steam stopped.

  Victor’s body flopped to the ground, his head a fist-sized clump of pulp, his lower jaw and mouth still visible.

  Qiang lolled his head around, a new nose, new eyes, new hair already sprouting from the shimmering bone, and turned his attention up toward where Madison was hovering, nauseous with despair.

  “Watch this,” he gurgled.

  Then Qiang stooped down, reached his hand toward the shining green bolus that was floating up from Victor’s torso. He took a deep, satisfied breath, and stretched his hand toward it.

  Then jerked his hand back, as if shocked. The glittering payload of energy, the remains of Victor’s power, hung in the air, untouched.

  “What?” Qiang blinked. He reached out again, was repelled again. The skin on his face rumpled with displeasure, then sagged, blackening suddenly. He jutted one hand up to catch it, to hold his face in place like a ruined mask. His hair was whitening, falling out in clumps, blown away by the sooty breeze fluttering through the ruined stadium.

  “What is this? What’s happening to me? Why can’t I-”

  Qiang was interrupted as a four-door sedan crashed down onto him like a meteor. He pulled his way out from beneath it, only to be driven into the floor by an Aura field made solid, a columnar forcefield that materialized in the air and rocketed down into the man, holding him fast.

  Flo hovered above him, eyes alight with fury.

  “You can’t take him, because he didn’t give you his consent,” Flo growled. “And your face is falling off your putrid skull because he hit you with enough radiation to fry a blue whale.”

  “Who-” Qiang paused, flicked his tongue. His mouth was caught between decay and regrowth, his regeneration struggling to keep up with how fast his flesh was falling back apart. “Whuh- radiation? Who’re you?”

  “I’m Victor’s daughter,” Flo said, fingers sparking as she readied a massive electrical attack. Madison felt her hair stand on end, and she wasn’t sure if it was due to the sheer amount of static or the sight of the girl floating above the ruined man, incandescent with power and rage. “And you’re a fucking dead man.”