Margaret gets behind Caroline and matches her movements, hands on her stardarters but not actually drawing them. She's never actually seen pros fight a swarm before. She watches carefully, thinking about how best she could communicate the monster's next moves in future fights like this one.

The monster rushes Vanessa. She dodges, dropping out of the sky and barely catching herself before she hits the street. It brakes - it moves as much by shapeshifting as by actually moving; "braking" takes the form of flattening itself as though hitting an invisible wall and letting air resistance slow it down, then sprouting new wings to take off in a new direction, at Caroline. Margaret gets to see why it's Caroline she's supposed to follow: she makes an invisible square shield and this time the invisible wall the monster pancakes itself against is real. Caroline can't do any spells but sustain the wall, but Vanessa and Susan can. Susan's empowering her ammo somehow; it sings high-pitched notes as it streaks through the air to tear chunks out of the creature, and Vanessa hurls her lightglobe again. The monster sizzles until the globe returns to her hand, and it grows many feet and starts trying to climb the shield, spreads out along its surface looking for handholds. It can't fall while Susan's still shooting at it, but it can get thinner and leave less mass in the path of each stardart.

When the monster is about to go for Caroline Margaret almost shouts a warning, but chokes it off at the last moment, wary of distracting her. This fight is nothing like what she's encountered before--less "pump darts into enemy", more coordinated tactics. Watching it once through her magic and again through her eyes, she can tell just how good these girls are.

The creature reaches an edge of the shield, but finds it impossibly thin and gets a tendril sliced off for its trouble. It suddenly shoops into a much smaller area, and several of Susan's darts miss, and it falls, then regains the power of flight and dives at Susan. Caroline dives after it.

Margaret swoops down too. Can Susan get out of the way in time?

Susan runs, but Caroline intercepts first, lands, and gets a shield in the monster's way again. Vanessa hits it with her ball again.

It's definitely smaller, but not by much.

"Stay on the opposite side of Caroline from the monster" is kind of hard to implement when Caroline is on the ground and the monster is above her. There's a brief window where she's out of position.

Nobody calls her on it.

Susan climbs a parked car to get shooting vantage.

The important thing is that the monster doesn't call her on it.

It is still slammed up against this shield getting shot at. Quicker this time, it shoops into a narrow profile and drops to the ground, trying to go under Caroline's shield and eat her toes. She dances back and throws invisible rectangles at it, slowing it down.

Margaret dances back and gets on top of a car so as not to get pinned against it.

The monster leaps into the air on frog-kangaroo-monster legs and trades them for wings at the top of its arc. Vanessa misses; Susan hits, but only most of the time; Caroline's accuracy is just okay but she can make her rectangles double back and hit it from the other side when she misses, if she's not trying to keep up a shield. They whittle away at the monster.

It goes suddenly after Vanessa on a shapeshifted helicopter blade's speed, right after she's recalled her ball from it to charge up again. Caroline tries to get there first but she's too slow, Vanessa tries to dodge but she's too slow, and Vanessa has to punch the monster in the center of mass with her charged-up fist. This does a huge amount of damage to the monster but it takes Vanessa temporarily out of the fight, splattered with goo; she flees the reeling creature to do emergency field patch on her costume while Caroline closes and pelts it with rectangles and Susan continues harrying it with stardarts.

Margaret really wants to start taking potshots, but as long as Caroline is up she'll stay behind her with her stardarters pointed down.

Caroline's up! The monster doesn't approach her again; it tries chasing Vanessa, but Caroline gets in its way, and then it tries Susan again, who's starting to run a little low on ammo. Susan jumps off the car and runs in Margaret's direction. "Ammo," she says, "I don't have time to regather it and I can make it go farther than you can."

Margaret grabs the belt of ammo off her bandolier and runs the rest of the way over to Susan to hand it off.

Susan reloads while Caroline does her best to solo the monster. Vanessa finishes handling her wardrobe emergency and flaps back in, charging her sphere. With a hail of darts, invisible rectangles, and lightglobes coming from all directions, the monster is finally reduced to its constituent ick and becomes a stain on the street.

Hooray! Margaret waits a moment to make sure it's dead, then starts sweeping everybody's ammo.

"Phew!" says Caroline. "Hell of a fight to run into your first day out."

"No kidding! I'm not sure if that was more or less educational than a smaller fight where I could have participated more. Though of course the important thing is that you took it out before it could hurt anybody."

"It's usually little ones we'll be happy to have you help shoot at," says Susan. "Carrying the extra ammo in did help, though, I don't generally need more than looks neat on my outfit for a younger swarm so the tradeoff's different."

"I'm glad I could be at least a little useful. How many shifts do you think I'll need to put in before I'm ready to join in the bigger fights, or do support with my precognitive stuff?"

"I think we'll need to actually drill with your precog stuff to interpret short-enough warnings in combat," says Vanessa. "We can borrow somebody with illusions who helps with that kinda thing for the whole county, and you can tell us what you see coming - if you work on illusions, do you think you do?"

"Drilling to work out a protocol sounds like a great idea. I could tell when Caroline was about to move her shield or you were about to do something with your light, so I expect I would work on illusions."

"Great. We can set up time for that on our overlap day - there's four squads, so three can cover round the clock and the other can substitute for our days off and training sessions. We call in a county substitute squad if somebody's sick but otherwise we're on six days a week."

"Which is fine since we can mostly screw around in the back of the truck," says Susan.

Vanessa goes on, "If you're gonna keep coming back, it's worth spending training sessions on your power."

"I'm definitely going to keep coming back. I have school, obviously, so I won't be able to do the full hours, but I'll be around as much as I can." She doesn't need precognition to foresee a massive drop in the amount of homework she does anywhere other than this truck.