witch's cape, not hat | Glowfic Constellation

wormcan

Later that evening, Lung is spotted in Empire territory. The PRT got called early, when he was just barely starting to ramp up. The sooner the first responders get there, the less outgunned they'll be. The relevant capes get notified as soon as possible and the vehicles head off right away.

witchwatcher

Gren flies high above the city and locates the exact area with enhanced vision. She mutters information about who's fighting and exactly where while waiting for the rest of the capes to arrive.

wormcan

She doesn't have long to wait. Armsmaster's motorcycle is fast, especially when Vista is one of the passengers.

Lung, still humanoid but two feet taller than usual, is fighting a group of Empire capes. Stormtiger is on the ground injured, Cricket is dodging Lung's blasts of fire, and Hookwolf is matching him blow for blow. Cricket and Lung notice Gren just before the other capes arrive on the scene.

witchwatcher

She descends enough for most of her powers to be in range and hits him with everything she can, all at once.

The area where Lung is, is now extremely difficult to move in. Everything slows to a stop - bullets, debris flying through the air, people. It won't immobilize Lung, but it should at least slow him down since he can no longer put momentum behind a punch or run. At the same time she starts sending down a steady stream of stunbolts. Not a huge burst of them, but a pace she can keep up for a while. And she tries to disorient or blind him with flashes of light.

wormcan

Hookwolf leaps at Lung, and falls short. His opponent launches a burst of fire, which also doesn't get anywhere. What it doesn't do is slow down either of their regeneration. Lung is still getting bigger and Hookwolf sprouts more metal. They're both good to keep going for a while. When the bolts start coming down, they stop striking each other and start staggering outside the area of effect first.

Cricket, outside the immediate combat area, jumps up at Gren. She bounds from the ground to a fence to a roof, and grabs for the Steelwing. Meanwhile, Gren gets disoriented and hit by a wave of nausea.

The Protectorate and Wards head toward Lung and Hookwolf, and the PRT backup starts to pull up.

witchwatcher

Cricket gets an undirected telekinetic shove, but Gren is distracted enough that the immobilizing field drops out. Cricket is doing some kind of - sound, so a sphere of silence is the way to shut her down.

After she recovers a bit, Hookwolf and Lung can both have improbably well-aimed (in reality, guided via a power) containment foam from her Steelwing's launcher gumming up as many joints and limbs as she can manage. And the immobilizing field and stream of stunbolts starts back up.

wormcan

Once Cricket is silenced, the disorientation shuts down. And the telekinesis means she hits the ground instead of the Steelwing. She sticks the landing and resumes the some kind of sound from outside the sphere of silence.

Hookwolf staggers and goes down after a few stunbolts. Lung staggers and doesn't. While Lung dodges Armsmaster's Halberd, Vista gets Clockblocker behind him and increases her teammate's reach. But between the immobilizing field and the intense heat around Lung, he doesn't manage to touch him.

witchwatcher

She can put a field of intense cold up instead, copied from the very Witch who did the same thing to Behemoth's heat attack.

(Cricket gets enough stunbolts, tracking ahead of her attempts to dodge, to go down and stay down, because maintaining the silence-sphere is annoying)

wormcan

Cricket is inhumanly good at dodging, but that just means it takes longer until one of the guided bolts hits her. Gren is free to focus on Lung.

Lung is unable to lay a hand on Armsmaster, but is also keeping his distance from the gray blur forming a haze around the end of the capitalized Halberd. A sudden move from Battery gets Clockblocker within touch range, much easier without Gren's momentum-dampening field. Lung manages to get an arm in her way, and both heroes sprawl across the ground.

witchwatcher

This is getting annoying. She holds still for a good ten seconds as she copies Clockblocker's power (It's a little easier to hold on to, now, but it still takes significant effort), and protects herself as best she can with her composite Witch-Lady Photon shield, and zooms up to Lung lightning fast and taps him on the slowest moving appendage.

wormcan

In those seconds, Lung burns Battery and Clockblocker. Less badly than it could have been without the cold, at least. Vista and Armsmaster shield them.

When Gren comes after him Lung throws a punch, not at her but at her Steelwing.
But she can freeze him with or without that. He stops where he stands. Containment foam starts burying him as soon as she gets out of the way.

witchwatcher

The Steelwing caves in all along one side, but is still sufficiently objectlike to wrench clear and crash on the other side of the street. She abandons it.

After a little swearing, she tells Armsmaster, "I can try to rig something to help keep him down. A shield, inside-out and exactly the shape of his current body. Might help stop him from smashing his way out of the foam."

wormcan

"Can you hold it long enough for him to give up? If he stops fighting, we win. If not, it might be better to save your power."

witchwatcher

"That depends on how long it takes him to give up. Ten minutes, definitely. An hour, probably. Three would be pushing it."

wormcan

Armsmaster nods. "Do it. Drop the shield if it's harder than you expect."

witchwatcher

She puts up the shield. The center of the growing mound of containment foam starts glowing slightly.

She'll be able to feel him trying to break free when the timefreeze wears off.

wormcan

In the meantime, they pile on more foam than should be necessary.

After about two minutes, Lung starts resisting. The shield and foam are restricting his movements, but he's heating up the area around him and battering the shield as best he can.

witchwatcher

The shield doesn't budge. Lung can barely move. It limits how much heat can escape, too.

Gren starts to look a little strained after a couple of minutes. "Half an hour."

wormcan

Lung can barely move, but he's resisting. As he resists he grows, and he's not growing in exactly the areas where the shield leaves space. The more this hurts Lung the more his power activates. Pressure on the shield rises.

witchwatcher

This sort of shield doesn't care very much whether it's holding back a splash of water or ten tons of angry dragon. It might crack eventually, but not yet.

wormcan

It's closer to a single ton of angry dragon in a space designed to hold five hundred pounds of angry not-yet-dragon. Amounts of dragon increase in a self-reinforcing loop. Lung tries overwhelming the shield with a concentrated blast of heat.

witchwatcher

The shield acquires the stunning effect the stunbolts have, all along its surface. If five seconds of that doesn't work, she drops the shield.

wormcan

Maybe when he was smaller and less scaled it would have worked. As it is he gets dizzy and uncoordinated, but stays conscious. It also slows down his rate of growth. That was partially based on regeneration from being crushed, and killing the pain is a side effect.

When it drops, he starts melting his way through the containment foam. After the first few holes in the sphere around him—one in front where he's breathing the most fire, one where his shiny new tail pokes through, and one where his arm does—Clockblocker freezes the foam. "We've got to get out of here."

witchwatcher

She mutters something, then whisper-spells to Armsmaster "In about twenty seconds, you get as much tranquilizer as you can into him and I'll give him an overcharged stunbolt. It'll be like hundreds of little ones hitting all at once. I need that twenty seconds though. If that doesn't work, I'm out of tricks unless you want me to kill him. Which I would be willing to try."

wormcan