When he stops being able to hit her, Legend swoops back to a nearby roof and grabs Armsmaster's density scanner, which he shipped down on a PRT transport as soon as Dragon's tip came in.

He flies back to the fight, watching the display.

"It's in the bay, about 50 feet past your bears," he tells his fellow hero. The bears show up on the density scanner as strange absences-of-water, which is lucky. It makes it easier for him to point Ursa in the right direction.

Weeping Cherry curses as the bears lope after her. She could superheat the water around her, but they're clearly not biological bears, and she doesn't really know if that would do anything to them.

Probably her best bet is to just outpace them. She rises to the surface, where she'll have an easier time shoving through the air instead of the water, but can still use the water as reaction mass.

And gets hit by a laser again. This one is blue, and encases her in a block of ice.

Weeping Cherry is so done.

She could just melt the ice, but she feels like she needs something more emphatic than that.

She grabs the ice around her, tears the water apart, and makes rocket fuel.

The impromptu iceberg shatters, and Weeping Cherry takes off in a continuous trail of explosions and steam.

Legend has no problem keeping up. He flies off to the side where the clouds of boiling steam won't scald him, and alternates between wide shots that turn the steam into snow, and tight invisible shots tuned to pass through the cloud and make his target alternately freeze, disintegrate, or explode.

Okay, she's lost the bears, but the explosions don't really seem to be helping anymore.

She stops sundering the water and redirects that power into speed. If she can go fast enough, then hopefully either she can throw off his aim or outpace him.

There's a loud boom as she breaks the sound barrier.

And then another, moments later, as Legend accelerates to keep her in sight. He rises higher into the air and aims ahead of her, trying to cut her off with a wall of ice before she reaches the lower bay.

Weeping Cherry tries to jump, but doesn't have the reaction time and plows into the ice. Her forb shoves it to either side to blunt the impact, making a deep crack in it. At the speed she's going, she does a lot more damage to the ice than it does to her.

Legend pulls out ahead of her, hitting the ice with more lasers to reinforce it.

"I think I've got it pinned down. We're just north of the Verrazzano-Narrows bridge," he radios.

Okay. Fine. This is fine. The bottom of the river protected her a little bit, and the bears are miles behind them.

Weeping Cherry disintegrates the ice under her, and makes for the bottom of the bay. She doesn't stop when she reaches it, falling through the mud, and then boring into the bedrock. She can dig faster than they can, probably.

She spends five minutes putting 100 meters of stone between her and the surface, and then turns and begins making her way south east, towards the open ocean.

Flechette sets down on the south side of the bridge, gaze flicking between the density scanner, the waves below, and the sight on her crossbow. She digs her heels into the bridge to get a stable shooting platform, and charges her bolt. It's a tricky shot, let alone to make blind. The density scanner gives her a good read on how deep the water is, though, so she can correct for the current fairly well.

She lets go of her nervous tension and takes a deep breath.

On the exhale, she fires.

One disadvantage of being buried in the earth is that Weeping Cherry cannot actually see very well. She's navigating by dead reckoning. So the sudden crossbow bolt from above comes as a surprise.

When the tip enters her forb's radius, it tries to shove it away, but the bolt is made from ... something. It's not a hyperdense crystal, but it is multidimensional, in a way that makes it tend to ignore anything trying to change its momentum, shoving any displacement into dimensions other than the three that her forb mostly currently cares about their relative positions in.

When it sees that it's not going to avoid a collision in the usual way, her forb reverses direction, throwing itself backwards up the tunnel.

But not quite fast enough.

The bolt passes right through her, leaving a semicircular notch in her tip.

"Ow! What the hell?" Cherry curses.

She was really expecting this much stone to do more (read: anything) to stop people from hitting her. She also doesn't exactly have much room or ability to dodge.

She settles for sliding back and forth through a six meter section of tunnel, changing direction and speed at random, scraping layers off of the top of the tunnel to enlarge it. If she can keep them from hitting her long enough for her to make a tunnel she can properly dodge in ...

Well, she'll still be entombed in the stone and getting shot at, but one thing at a time.

"I don't think I'm going to get another shot, sir. It's dodging," Flechette reports, gesturing at the screen of the scanner. "I'm not even sure whether I hit it."

Legend claps her on the shoulder. "It's alright. If it knows to dodge, that means you hit it."

"That was the exciting part, now it's time for the dull part. We're going to stay here and keep it bottled up by shooting it if it tries to tunnel any farther or tries to surface. Now that we know for sure it was headed here, Eidolon and Alexandria are on their way. Eidolon will be able to come up with something to pry it out," he reassures her.

When there fail to be any more sudden multidimensional crossbow bolts, Weeping Cherry gets to work chipping away at the front of her tunnel in randomized bursts, before realizing that she's ignoring the water again.

She starts collecting liquid hydrogen and oxygen, pulling more water down the channel left by the crossbow bolt. When she has as much as she can hold, she releases it.

The blast significantly expands her tunnel, but more importantly it widens the shaft the crossbow left in the rock.

And it blows a plume of water into the air, just in time to soak Eidolon as he teleports in with Alexandria.

The heroes confer for a moment before Alexandria moves to help the PRT troopers closing off access to the bridge, and Eidolon lets go of everything except his flight power.

He feels the new powers slot into place in his head. Let's see ... he has a trump power to grant people minor battle precognition, and a shaker power that turns material transparent.

He glances back at Legend and Flechette, before turning the water and ground under him transparent so he can see what they're dealing with.

Hah! That sounds like a problem for people who let photons interact with them.

... actually, yeah. That does sound like a problem for people who let photons interact with them. Weeping Cherry hits Legend and Flechette in the face with bright green lasers, tuned to activate their blink reflexes instead of permanently blinding them.

She tries to hit Eidolon in the face with a laser, but he somehow manages to dodge a lightspeed attack, and continue dodging as she tries to move the laser to catch him. Whatever, trying to keep a laser on him doesn't require any concentration. She leaves it and goes back to synthesizing another batch of rocket fuel.

Eidolon sees the other heroes clap their hands to their eyes and turn away, but he is suddenly quite occupied dodging. He can't tell what he's dodging, though, which is annoying.

That's because Weeping Cherry actually uses physics, thank you. Her lasers are only visible when they interact with something, and the only non-invisible thing in their path is Eidolon's face.

He can't cycle out precognition or flight, at this point, so he lets go of the shaker power. The water under him slowly fades to visibility again. He stops having to dodge. The power that drops in to replace it is a teleportation power.

He lands back on the bridge. "I'm not sure what that was. Do you need to fall back?"