Cassie added, "I'm ready."

She was. According to her suit's stats, her leg had grown back.

"Now would work," Tara said.

Still camouflaged, I poked my head up, pointing my arm at Dr. Mind, testing his shield. My sonics ran through various frequencies at a low volume, checking which were the most resonant.

Then I passed those frequencies to everyone's PAs and even my spare sonic on Julie's costume. I pushed up the volume to the maximum.

As it turned out, Dr. Mind's shield wasn't the only object in the room vulnerable to those frequencies. Mugs, monitors, and even some of the giant wall screens shattered. Not far from me, a mug labeled "World's Greatest Dad" blew apart. The pieces, which, like me, were in Camille's high gravity zone, hit the floor, breaking into even smaller chunks.

I'd have felt bad, but if Dad worked for the Nine, it was a questionable sentiment.

Over the group channel, Jaclyn said, "Yes!"

I wondered why, and my implant gave me a summarized version of Izzy, Jaclyn, and Tiger's fight with Dr. Mind's troop of green, armored guards. I'd noticed it wasn't going as easily as I would have expected, but I had no time to pay attention to why.

The green glow on their armor was a green force field. They could take a punch from Izzy or Jaclyn and survive. In fact, they'd been striking back with a solid punch of their own or a lower-power version of Dr. Mind's blasts.

I wondered if I'd also see a bit of Artificer tech powering the guards' armor when I had time to look.

The armor alone didn't explain their coordination, though. The guards moved like a single organism, always firing, charging or retreating with coordinated moves that couldn't have been planned.

Neither Jaclyn, Izzy, nor Tiger was in immediate danger, but their suits were already using backup material for repairs.

When the PAs started blasting, though, all of their force fields dropped, a coordinated move they didn't expect. In that moment, the fight changed. Jaclyn and Izzy began to one-shot their attackers, a punch at a time.

As for Tiger, we'd trained him to fight in coordination with us, but back on Hideaway, his kind hunted dinosaur-sized creatures in packs.

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It wasn't pretty.

In the middle of one of their coordinated moves, one where they'd scattered and aimed their beams at Jaclyn and Izzy, Tiger barreled through the group, still invisible, veering left and right to knock more over, and making it to the end of the group. There, he grabbed the last one in his mouth and dragged him into a side hall.

When he reappeared a moment later, he grabbed the next nearest by the neck, giving a quick shake that left the guard's limbs limp and dangling.

Jaclyn, meanwhile, had carved out her own path of destruction, one punch at a time, leaving a line of unmoving suits of armor. Izzy in turn, had targeted the rest with a sonic blast of her own. She could have taken out the wall, but she narrowed her attack, leaving shattered faceplates and cracks in their armor.

For all the destruction, it was within our terms of engagement for this fight. Where possible, we'd leave people alive but restrained. For anyone who had a realistic chance of hurting one of us, the important thing was to get them out of the fight, however that worked best.

We'd already lost one of our own in the last few days.

While this was going on, I wasn't paying as much attention to them as I was to Dr. Mind. His shield wobbled, and I tried to think of ways to pour more energy into it, adjusting everyone's sonic attacks to attack all of the same spots.

We weren't all on the same side of the room or even facing the same direction, but I did what I could.

It seemed to be working too, because while the shield didn't break, the wobbles began to remind me of waves on a stormy lake.

"Portal," Tara said, "now."

Dr. Mind, meanwhile, had stopped turning his skull, facing directly in my direction.

"There you are," he said, and the eyes and mouth of the skull began to glow.

I didn't stay there. I shot upward using the rockets. Whatever means he'd used to triangulate where I was, it would be harder for him to hit if I moved.

I continued to point my sonics at him, though.

The blast of greenish-white energy passed below me, near enough that I could feel the heat through my boots and see the repair notifications begin.

On the bright side, I still had feet.

Cassie, though, had appeared underneath him, her father's sword in her hands. I don't know if it could have cut through Dr. Mind's shield before, but in this moment, it was the last straw.

The blade's monomolecular edge sliced through the force field, and it popped like a balloon, releasing the energy that had kept the field together.

I could see alerts from Cassie's armor as the heat hit. It wasn't enough to kill her, but I could tell from how her vitals spiked that she felt it.

The blast from the cut blew apart the cubicle below Dr. Mind, setting it on fire.

Cassie's sword continued through, into the skull, even as the blade glowed red.

Dr. Mind's skull began to turn away from me and toward Cassie, but then it fell, dividing into two pieces, revealing Dr. Mind, such as he was.

No longer simply a brain in a jar, this was a brain in a ceramic container filled with fluids, the brain no longer shaped to fit inside a human skull. This extended outward into tubes that connected to wires and machines that might have been flesh and bone, but also might have been ceramic.

Cassie jumped back, landing on her feet and avoiding a hit from either of the separated pieces as well as the small fire.

Through all that, she hadn't lost the sword and held it in her hands, pointing it toward Dr. Mind.

I noticed at about the same time she did (to judge from her downward glance) that it was missing three-quarters of the blade.

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