Your Pretty Face Is Going To Limbo (Part Three)

David, Eddie, Hisako, the Cuckoos, Cessily, Sooraya, Josh, and Julian were all first up to take part in a Danger Cave simulation. I stood on the sidelines, just outside of the cave chamber, to observe, alongside Santo, Megan, Laura, Noriko, Sofia, Ben, and Nicky. We were set to go second, but everyone was going to get a chance to go, and a chance to watch.

It was the first time we had all been together since I'd gotten the team roster. Seeing us all in one place just helped it sink in for me that this was real.

Eddie, Hisako, Julian, Cessily, Santo, Sooraya, Megan, Nicky, Ben, Sofia, David, Noriko, Laurie, Josh, and the Cuckoos. All of those people were under my umbrella of influence. I was responsible for them, and I had no plans on letting any of them down.

Eddie couldn't get over the fact that someone his age had designed his own combat simulator, "This is so money," He said to David, constantly looking around, "Dude, if I were you, I would have sold this."

"I still can," David informed him with a smirk. Eddie gaped at him before offering a congratulatory 'too sweet'. Unfortunately, he wasn't privy enough to the inner workings of the Paladins to know how to reciprocate.

Hisako took note of all of the people around her that she was set to work with, and then over with me, "Sol, what's with these weird combinations?"

A grand question. One that I was excited to answer to show off my leader chops, "I already know that everyone who's been on teams together are fine, but I've gotta find which other combinations of us are good," Honestly, I'd been rather tame on splitting people up. There were at least two people from every student training squad together on a team for some sense of familiarity, "I'm gonna start mixing it up like a mad scientist during practices. Everyone's gonna work with everyone at some point."

Except for any combination involving Julian and Noriko. Not anytime soon. Like, until the heat death of the universe.

"We all ready to go?" I asked, eager to see the Danger Cave in action.

"For sure," David confirmed, "The simulations can support up to ten people. We're going to start with us ten in the first place and the rest of you guys can give it a go afterwards. Solaris?"

"Right. This is just a test run," I said for the benefit of everyone, "I threw a bunch of New Mutants in this one so they can help all the newbies through it."

"You're a newbie too," Noriko 'helpfully' pointed out.

I rolled my eyes, knowing that she was poking fun at me in good nature, "Yeah, that's why I kept you, Wind Dancer, and Wallflower out for the next turn. We're going to need you to walk us through it too, Pikachu."

"That's kinda racist."

My entire body turned Nori's way at that accusation, "What? How!?" I thought it had been a good crack.

Nori raised an eyebrow at my indignant reply, "Because you specifically compared me to a Japanese mascot character."

I stopped her there, picking up where she was trying to lead me, "-Wow. I hadn't even thought of that," I'd only had the electricity comparison in mind, "Great, now I need to come up with a new name to fuck with you. I liked that one."

"-And apologize again," Nori added cheekily, making me believe that had truly been her goal.

"I'm sorry. And that's the last of those you're getting," I droned, narrowing my eyes while the blue-haired girl grinned at me, "Don't get used to that. None of you get used to that, you hear me?"

Hisako let out a laugh amongst the others in her group, "Wow. You got an apology out of him. Way to go."

I needed things to progress before I lost the room completely, "Stop talking!" I demanded, through most everyone else's snickering, "Prodigy, start the simulation, so I can have it out with your girl without as big a peanut gallery!"

David chuckled to himself, but did as I asked, hitting a switch on the wall that turned the Danger Cave on. On a nearby terminal, he booted up a simulation of his choosing, "This one should be a mission with enough people. We'll be taking on the Marauders."

Once he chose the simulation, the machine kicked in and all we could see from the outside was a mishmash of lights concealing whatever was happening inside. We could hear everyone though, which was good. Eventually, from our point of view, it turned into a picture of what was going on inside, like looking through glass, only not.

Santo giggled to himself like a kid in anticipation. It was weird seeing a giant rock-person so giddy, "Man, my first X-Men training session. I'm so ready! We'll finally get to kick some supervillain ass for real!"

Others tried to play it cooler than him, but it was clear a lot of the others felt the same, especially the ones less used to real action than others. One in particular though, didn't share the same sentiment to the letter.

Megan, even surrounded by Ben and Nicky, her former Paragon teammates, couldn't find a taste for the danger that lay ahead, "Uh, I could do without jumping into that just yet," She said uncertainly.

We weren't together anymore, so I couldn't just sit her down and candidly ask her why she even volunteered for the team. The last time we spoke, I'd talked to her just long enough to make sure she was okay with me being the leader, which she said she was, along with Nicky and Ben.

Before, she'd made it clear to me that the breakneck life wasn't her thing, and she could have bowed out. The new squad was entirely optional, even for those who qualified to be on it. But she didn't. So, there she was, my ex, suited up with the rest of us. Granted, it was just for training. But we were training for the real deal. I made a mental note to try and come up with some way to build up her confidence more. That would be awkward, but then again, what interaction with Megan hadn't been since she dumped me?

Problems for later. Maybe I could even do something to fix them during the current training session? Who knew?

"Should I have gone in with both groups?" I asked aloud to no one in particular, just trying to make conversation as we looked on at the fracas going on in the simulation, "We won't be running any missions without me being on them, so it would make more sense, right?"

Ben, blunt and humorless as he was, was the first person to speak up, "That's a 'you' call, I'd imagine. I wouldn't worry about it too much for the first time, but I'd keep it in mind," He was right, of course. I was in charge, so whatever we did was my decision in the end.

Nicky showed a bit of concern for my well-being, "Wouldn't that wipe you out? Doing two sessions back-to-back?"

"I think I'll be fine," I said. Truth be told, it was getting harder and harder to wear myself out, "Doubling up on training will be good for me, I think."

Inside the simulation, as the fight continued to go on, the walls and floor of the cave began to vibrate gently, "Man, they're going to town in there," Nicky said, "Is the Danger Cave supposed to do this?"

Noriko shrugged, "I've never felt anything outside when it was running before."

One could have mistaken it as a minor earthquake, but as a guy who lived in motherfucking California... no. No, it was not. It was also getting warmer fast, and it had nothing to do with the power output from the Danger Cave. It felt like something was wrong, but nothing anyone could put their finger on.

And then the world turned to fire. Out of nowhere, we could see nothing but thick flames. The ground collapsed underneath us, and we all fell. We fell, and fell, and fell. We fell so long, that when we finally hit the ground we weren't as... dead as I'd expected us to be.

I sat up as quickly as I could, hands glowing for a fight, only to find no enemy upon us. We were on a cliff, and from where I looked out, I found nothing but a desolate, rocky expanse. The ground was cracked, glowing red just underneath the surface. That couldn't possibly bode well. What also wasn't good was that there was no sunlight in sight. From a look at the power sensor implant in the palm of my hand, I was still in the blue, which was good. The light I had available wouldn't be enough to recharge.

The others started to pick themselves up, the ones more used to danger doing so quicker, despite the lack of an immediate threat.

Santo got up, looking none the worse for wear. Sometimes it paid to be made of rock, "Okay, what the hell just happened?"

"Great question," I growled under my breath and yelled out loud, "Is this part of the simulation, Prodigy? Because that fire and that fall felt fucking real, but we're not dead!" My voice echoed in the open air, over the sound of bubbling lava, but I didn't get a response, "Prodigy?"

Noriko started searching around for her boyfriend, only to find nothing, "David?"

A quick headcount told me that I only had my group that I'd prepared to train with as company. Santo, Megan, Laura, Noriko, Sofia, Ben, and Nicky were with me, but no one else.

Nicky couldn't help but let concern bleed into his tone, "This is part of the sim... right? Solaris?"

"I..." I looked around at everyone. When I got to Laura, she softly shook her head 'no'. My stomach dropped, "...No, Wolf Cub. No, I don't think it is."

A grave expression formed on Sofia's face, "Bellamy, what do you know?"

Honestly, nothing. I had seen what everyone else had, and nothing more, "From the looks of things, we might be in some serious trouble. Any ideas where we are?" I asked around.

No one else had any answers either. Santo especially, "I dunno. Hell? Looks like Hell."

"It's not hot enough to be Hell," I replied, taking in our surroundings, "I'm assuming Hell is stupid-agonizingly-hot. This place isn't that hot. It's mostly just ugly as sin and smells like butt."

"What you're smelling is sulfur," Laura pointed out with a wrinkle to her nose.

"-Which smells like butt, Laura," I added after the fact. The scent had to have been playing hell on her and Nicky's senses.

"Half of us are fucking missing!" Noriko snapped, "We've got to do something!"

Sofia did her best to reassure her friend and longtime teammate, "We will, Nori. But we need to know what has happened first. We don't even know what this is."

This had never happened before, so we all had to fall back on what we were taught. How many of us were taught to find our way when we were lost in hostile environments? I was, because Miss Pryde had been very thorough in making sure I was caught up with the rest of the Paladins when I first arrived at school.

"Wind Dancer or Pixie," I said, getting the girls' attention, "Can one of you head up and try to get a bird's eye view? Maybe you can see something. Maybe the others?"

Megan raised her hand and started to take off, "I'm on it!"

I watched her ascend before turning to the others to say more, "When Pix gets back, we'll start moving. We all fell together, right? Wherever we are, we can't be that far away from the others."

I didn't even know if that was true or not, but I needed to take charge and get people to chill out somehow. If I hadn't, I felt that Nori would have scrambled off trying to search this place we knew nothing about all on her own. She had the speed to ditch us if she really wanted to. I just hoped she wasn't that impulsive.

Nicky was the youngest out of us, and couldn't help but be a bit scared, "The X-Men will come for us, right?" He was on the team, but he'd never seen real fighting. Despite looking like a junior werewolf, he was a gentle kid.

As much as I hated to break it to him, I needed him to know what he was in for, "As far as we're concerned, we are the X-Men," "Even if this was something where we could reasonably expect a rescue, they don't exactly have the best track record with students lately."

A silence fell over everyone at that. There were fairly fresh wounds all around, given that people we all knew had recently died during Stryker's attack. Santo was the first to speak up, "Dude, harsh."

"I know... I know..." I said it, and I wasn't going to apologize for it. I meant it, and I had a point, "This team was put together so that when shit like this happens, we don't just sit around waiting for the 'real heroes' to do something. We're all trained. At some point it's just a matter of throwing us into it."

We were the real heroes here. No one was going to save us but us.

Ben scowled, more annoyed than afraid, with his flaming balls of steel. He didn't disagree with me, "And this is that point, huh?"

"Looks like it," I said begrudgingly. I would have rather we got a more controlled environment to dip our toes into first. Then again, I doubted anyone was ever ready when they started, "So, who's ready to go on an adventure!?"

No one raised their hand or said yes... except Santo. I don't know what else I expected, especially since I barked the question at them without the slightest hint of positivity. I was all about defiant sarcasm and angry inspiration, not fanciful whimsy.

"BEL! EVERYONE! LOOK OUT!"

Megan's warning from above came in time for us to all see a horde of creatures ambling our way. Monsters and demons of various shapes and sizes shuffled for us.

Everyone got ready for battle. I stood between Laura, her claws popped, and Nicky, his claws and fangs bared, "How did neither of you guys hear or smell them them coming?" I asked, not really wanting an answer. I fired the first shot before anyone could defend themselves.

A preemptive blast from me started the chain reaction of the creatures charging us. Ben and Noriko followed suit, hurling fire and electricity respectively. There were so many though, they pushed through despite their fried cohorts.

Santo charged down the biggest thing he could find and started trading haymakers with it. When smaller monsters tried to crawl all over him to help bring him down, Laura jumped onto his back and started stabbing and slashing all of them off of him.

So, wherever we were, humans didn't dwell. That was good to know. We were on another planet, or what?

"This is not working!" Sofia said, using her wind powers to keep mobile around the battlefield. She had no qualms with blowing anything that got too close to her off of the cliff. Good for her, "We're being pushed back! And there's nowhere to be pushed back to!"

Nowhere but over the edge of the cliff. None of us could survive a spill into lava... except maybe Santo... and maybe Laura. But that was it.

This wouldn't work. We had no coordination. With the Paladins, when things broke down and original plans inevitably failed, we'd drilled enough to be able to fall into a default formation without thinking about it. There was no form here; no line. Laura had originally stuck close to me because she remembered the Paladin formation, but other than that original bit of teamwork, we were scattered.

And with the sheer numbers of our enemies, it didn't take long for it to start to wear on many of us. We needed an opening, and watching our two airborne teammates, I got an idea.

"Pix, launch dust!" I ordered, ducking the swing of a... sharpened tentacle? A hastily thrown light blade quickly removed that problem, "Lots of it!"

Megan could hear me, and moved into position, willing to give it a try, "Where!?"

"Not on us!" I replied vaguely. I didn't care as long as it went up some bad guy's nose, "Wind Dancer, control the Pixie's dust!"

Sofia saw the glittering dust from Megan's wings and controlled the air around it to blow in the faces of the most monsters she could aim for, "Will this work?"

"I don't fucking know, Sof!" I yelled candidly, in the middle of helping Nicky fend off a handful of creatuers that had gotten close. It was then that I noticed two flying monsters gunning for Laura on Santo's back, "Laura!" I warned her before one hand fired a concussive shot her way.

With reflexes that, I'll admit, I would find myself drifting off and randomly think about the mechanics and precision of, Laura got in the way and used her claws to split my beam and shoot down both monsters after her and some of the ones crawling up on Santo.

I didn't have the chance to appreciate it at the time, given the chaos of the moment, but in hindsight, it was one of the coolest goddamn things I would ever see her do. Seriously, I have no idea how she did that on the spot. I have to just stop right now and break down all of the moving parts involved, because I refuse to gloss over this.

Laura couldn't move faster than light, because, duh, light, so she had to get in the way of where she saw my fist aiming before I took the shot and already have her claws where they needed to be to properly split and re-aim said shot. To add onto that, she had to know at a glance it was a concussive shot that was stable enough to touch, because if it had been an explosive shot, she couldn't have reflected it. It would have just blown up on her and spread bits of Laura all over Santo's rocky mass.

We repeated the feat afterwards as a regular move that we did, but those were always planned. There was always a specific tell to let her know it was coming. We even fucking named it Tequila Sunrise. However, there was nothing like the first time. The original was spontaneous. She had no warning, she just did it and it worked.

I don't mean to spend so much time on what amounted to three decent seconds, at most, of action in real time, and I don't mean to be needlessly vulgar... but my dick moves a little bit every time I think about that moment. Good God, woman.

...

...Oh, yeah. Using Sofia's wind to blow more of Megan's pixie dust in the monsters' faces totally worked. That was very important to us not dying.

"It's working! Brilliant!" Megan seemed pleasantly surprised by her role in the success, "They're actually stopping! They're not running though."

Sofia hovered in the air nearby, taking in the scene before her with a measure of confusion, "Megan, what does the Pixie dust make them see?"

A question that she had never been able to answer, "I have no idea. Something awesome, I bet."

As someone who had been hit with it before, I don't know what it made them see, but it confused them just long enough for us to tear through them and buy ourselves some breathing room – like the momentary lull in a beat 'em up video game when you're fighting waves of enemies. It was still a battle of attrition. There were more of them than there were of us, and things got worse from there.

"This is bullshit!" Santo snapped, holding both of his fists up in the direction of an approaching group, "Eat rock fists, demon!"

Something went wrong. Santo could detach parts of himself. Most of us had seen him do his flying fists thing before. Only, this time, for some reason, when he went for it, his entire body. Chunks of rock went flying everywhere, making for particularly effective shrapnel against monsters and Laura alike.

"SANTO!" Ben exclaimed. Much like the rest of us, he couldn't believe what he'd seen.

Laura flew away from Santo, where she'd been fighting up until that point, and nearly slid off of the cliff until I stopped her by blasting the path in front of her. Hopefully it didn't hurt, but after getting shredded by Santo pieces, she probably had other pressing concerns that she needed a moment to deal with.

So, that left us without two of our close-range fighters, which meant when the enemy started to encroach, it was harder to beat them back. And everyone else was starting to get tired. Most people weren't living solar batteries. As Ben and Noriko started to slow down, I tried to pick up the slack. At least by then, we had established a line.

"Sol," Ben said. The flame emanating from his head was weaker than it normally was, "What are we going to do? There's nowhere to fall back to."

When in doubt, I would have told them to buy me some time to make a Lux Bomb, but when the stupid thing went off, it would destroy the cliff we were all on. That meant the only way out was through. Laura had recovered enough to keep going, and I was prepared to issue the order, when a large winged, clawed demon swept into the enemy ranks.

The lot of them fled, even casting themselves over the sides of the cliff to get away. Not from us, but from that one demon. Or more specifically, the axe-wielding person riding on its back that lopped off the heads of anything unlucky enough to get close. Then, it was just them and us.

I was almost fooled into thinking the person on the demon was human. Almost. She had long blonde hair and the frame of a woman just a bit older than us. She was scantily clad, with armor on her shoulders and arms. But when I looked closer, I could see red horns on her head, a red tail coming from her back, and beneath her spiked metal kneepads, she had the lower legs of a goat.

"What in the hell?" Noriko remarked, "Is this good, or bad?" A great question. But at least it gave us a chance to catch our breath.

Nicky didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, "Seeing as how she made the demons go away... I'd like to think it was good," To be fair, I couldn't blame him.

By this time, Laura was fully back on her feet, with a few new holes in her costume that would have to be repaired, "You okay?" I asked.

"I was blown up," Laura replied matter-of-factly.

I rolled my eyes, "I know. That's why I asked," If she wanted to take a bite with her sarcasm baby teeth, I was the wrong one to do it with in the middle of a combat zone, "I was just being courteous. I've seen you with your rib cage open before, girl."

In the meantime, the demon woman dismounted from her flying monster and took in the sight of six dirty, bloody, tired teenagers with her devilish red eyes. Eventually, we finally heard her speak, "N'Astirh," She said, getting a growl from the creature with her as she pointed over at one of us, "...Bring me that one."

It was Megan, "Oh, nuts," She'd been pointing at Megan.

The demon, N'Astirh, flew straight for my ex, brushing most of the others out of the way when they tried to put themselves between it and her. Whatever the circumstances behind our breakup, I was not prepared to allow my ex to be chained up by some goat-legged bitch in Hell, or wherever we were.

"Nah, fuck that," I said to myself shooting N'Astirh in the face. It took a header into the rock and dirt, showing that it was pretty durable. Good for it.

N'Astirh started getting up, glaring at where he'd last seen me, "I will rip out your-," The threat went unfinished when I cut off its goddamn wings from its blind spot with a light blade.

I ignored the pained roaring and screeching, aiming for N'Astirh's open mouth as it writhed on the ground, "You're gonna what now? 'Die?' That was a very astute assumption of you. Points for being self-aware," I was waiting for a good angle to put an explosive blast down its throat and end its life.

Unfortunately, N'Astirh was not the most dangerous thing we were dealing with at the moment.

Anyone getting up from getting bowled over by a demon beast was kept down by bright, presumably painful green-colored light. I shot back before I could be hit, clashing my light energy against... whatever she was using. She was not pleased by our stubbornness.

"You're fighting me!?" The demon woman snapped, slowly pushing me back, "I saved you!"

I grit my teeth and tried to dig my feet in, but on solid rock, I just felt myself losing my footing, "We don't even know who you are!" Parts of her beam branched off and honed in on me, hitting me while I was occupied, "GAAAH!"

It hurt. A lot. That probably went without saying.

"The name is Darkchild, boy," The woman taunted as she walked past me. I tried to lunge at her from the ground, but she blasted me again without even turning around, "Don't forget it."

I wouldn't. Pain was a very good method of retaining information.

The last two of us standing at the moment were Megan and Noriko. All the while, Darkchild slowly moved toward them, "You're only alive because of me. Because I pulled you away from him. If it weren't for me, your innards would be strung across Belasco's castle right now. Just like your friends."

Nori bristled at the reminder that we'd landed without our full party, "What about our friends? What did you say?" Impulsively, she lashed out get the answers she wanted, but a snap of Darkchild's fingers collapsed the ground beneath her feet, leaving her a sitting duck for the same blast that put most of us down for the count.

"Don't worry. There's a solution here," Darkchild said to Megan and Megan alone, a vicious grin on her face, "If you ever want to see your friends again... I need one of your souls," She wasn't looking anywhere else.

I didn't like the sound of that, and started getting up again, probably to get knocked back down again. That was when I heard Nicky calling out to me from where he'd been felled moments before I had, "Bellamy. Bel. That's... that's..."

I couldn't make out what he was trying to tell me at first, "Nick, what? I can't tell what you're saying."

"That's... that's Colossus' sister," My lupine comrade said, pointing at Darkchild, "She was... teammates with Miss Sinclair in the original New Mutants. That's how I recognize the name."

I looked at the demonic woman that had handed us our asses and tried to reconcile her image with that of the sweet looking girl in Mister Rasputin's picture, "I don't remember Mister Rasputin telling me about his sister having horns, a tail, and goddamn hooves, dude," Then again, I never did ask him what her powers were.

Nicky insisted, "I'm telling you man, I'm sure! I'm absolutely sure!"

He was so insistent about it that I had to take the idea into account. It wasn't like we had much else to go off of, "You willing to bet your life on it? Because we're about to," I looked around at all of the others who were down.

Nick and I both got up and limped over to Darkchild from behind. She was busy backing Nori and Megan down, continuing to try and persuade them to do things her way.

"I can feel him. Belasco. He's hurting your friends right now," Her voice was even and confident. Assured in the information she was sharing with us, "I know what he's thinking, what he's feeling. But he's stronger than me. He made sure of that."

Megan shook her head, keeping her distance that was quickly running out. She could have flown away, but she didn't want to leave us, "I don't understand. What do you want?"

"The only thing that can kill Belasco for good is a Soulsword, and I've lost mine," In what seemed like an instant, Darkchylde was upon her. But instead of attacking, she tenderly stroked Megan's cheek, "In order to form a Soulsword, one needs a soul. Now, tell me. Do you want to save your friends? Would you give your soul to save them?"

Megan placed a hand on her chest and looked down, "You want... my soul?"

I fired a quick blast from behind that hit Darkchild in the back. She hissed in pain and glared back at me and Nicky, "Megan, don't listen to her!" I yelled as we kept limping over, "We'll find another way! We don't know her, and we haven't tried anything else yet! We-!"

"No more saviors, little Pixie," Darkchild snapped her fingers again, raising the rock around us and encasing us all in it. All with the exception of herself and Megan, "You are alone. The decision to save your friends or save your own skin is yours alone," She held out an amulet with a pentagram and five empty slots on it, "I can hear their cries."

I couldn't break free. I wasn't strong enough. None of us were. Even the ones of us who could be considered in fighting shape.

"Please stop," Megan finally asked, shaking her head, "I don't want any more of my friends to die," Tears welled up in her eyes. It was really hard to see. Even if she was my ex-girlfriend, I still cared about her. I cared a lot, "I'll do whatever it takes."

Mister Rasputin's sister or not, the devilish smile on Illyana's face made me want to punch it, "Good girl," She put her hands out toward Megan and began to draw bright, wispy blue light directly from her body, her eyes, and her mouth, "Try not to scream."

She did scream. She screamed a lot.

"I was six years old," Illyana said over the sound of Megan's screams, "Belasco took apart my soul piece-by-piece to form the Blood Stones. He took my innocent soul and twisted it, to use as a sacrifice to the elder gods."

Nicky couldn't so much as move his head, "Guys, wake up!" He begged the others. Our faces were the only parts of us free so that we could breathe, "Bel, do something! She's hurting Megan!"

I didn't respond. I was trying. I was in the same exact position he and everyone else was in. I might have been faster and stronger than regular people with my power enhancement, but I couldn't just break solid rock, especially with no momentum or leverage. The best I could do was start chipping away with small concussive shots. Small, because the kick from large ones would break my arm with nowhere for it to go, and concussive because I couldn't open my hands. It took time, but I could feel things loosening up.

Illyana continued draining Megan's soul, pulling into an amulet around her neck, "When he had all five pieces of my soul, he would have the power to bring them to Earth. You and I, little Pixie, we will use your innocence against Belasco," She declared, "Innocence is power. And power is the Soulsword."

"Please stop! It hurts!" Megan begged of her, and all for nothing.

"I know," It seemed as though Illyana honestly felt some kind of remorse or empathy, if only for a moment, "I remember."

I could feel myself starting to wiggle loose, and kept firing. Just a little more.

On Illyana's amulet, a red stone began to fill in one of the open slots, "The Soulsword is your life, Megan. It is your soul forged into a weapon. With the Soulsword, your innocence can destroy. It can cut magic, and make spells bleed."

In the air, above Megan's body, her soul began to form a blade and handle. Okay. It was there. Great. Now, stop. But she didn't stop, and another slot in her amulet started to fill.

"With your soul, Pixie... I can kill Belasco."

She wasn't going to stop at whatever it took to make one Bloodstone. She wanted all of them, and it would take everything Megan had to make that happen.

I finally got loose enough to blast myself free, right at Illyana. I slammed full-force into her back with my feet, and sent her flying. I didn't get the satisfying feeling of any bone breaking, but there were more pressing issues to deal with.

Megan fell to the ground, eyes closed, with new black streaks in her formerly solid pink hair. Her lack of any kind of motion gave me no small amount of anxiety, when I made it to her side, "Pix! Pix, I swear to God, if you're dead, I'm gonna strangle that bitch with her own tail! Tell me you're okay!"

She was breathing, so I kept trying to shake and pat the poor girl awake. Eventually, I was rewarded with her eyes slowly cracking open, "Mmmm..."

That would have to do for the time being, because we weren't alone. I blasted away some of the rock around Nicky and the others so they could get themselves out whenever they started to stir, and turned to face Illyana, who was far from pleased by being dropkicked fifty feet away.

Green magic covered both of her hands as her red eyes glowed angrily, "You will suffer for-!"

"-Get away..." A familiar voice from seemingly nowhere said as chunks of rock began to tear from the ground in front of Illyana. "YOU GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY FRIENDS!"

I couldn't believe it, "Santo! You're not dead!" Illyana hadn't even known we'd had another person with us before she showed up, from the surprise on her face, and in her reaction of immediately blasting him with both hands.

Unfortunately for her, our rock boy was back with a vengeance. His body now looked more like the land around us, dark, with lines of molten rock all over him. He walked right through Illyana's attack, "You hear me devil chick! I don't care how hot you are, I'm gonna rip those horns off and use 'em as toothpicks!" He snatched her up off of the ground like she was nothing, "And that's just for starters..."

While Santo slammed Illyana against the nearest surfaces he could find, Megan had fully come to, "I'm... I'm..." Looking down at her hand, she held a small dagger, still steaming with the blue energy that had formed it, "...My soul."

Illyana's attempts to fight Santo back were all for naught, "Your stupid light show ain't doing shit, Dazzler," He taunted, slamming her against a wall and holding her there, "I saw you. I saw you hurt them. All I could do was watch, but now… you're done."

With Megan seemingly being alright, I stomped over to where Santo had Illyana pinned. Completely ignoring the fact that he was already putting the squeeze on her, I punched her dead in the face, "Whoa! Marcher, uncool!"

Really? He'd just ragdolled her all over the place, and me hitting her was the bridge that was too far?

"I don't give a fuck!" I bellowed, feeling the spittle fly out of my mouth, "She magicked my whole team and made me watch her torture my ex. As a matter of fact, I still want to do the whole 'strangle that bitch with her own tail' thing. Yeah, that sounds great, actually!"

Before I could do the aforementioned strangling, Megan, of all people, flew in and literally held me back from throttling my teacher's demonic little sister, "Bellamy, stop! We need her to take us to find the others."

Hearing that we had plans for her stirred Illyana. The Darkchild still had plans for us, it seemed, "The rock person's form may be resistant to my magic now, but I will kill-!" She shut up when I punched her again.

"Dude!" Santo said, "I know she's an evil, demon chick, but I've got her! Quit punching a woman!" It was weird being rebuked by Santo of all people, "Seriously, Goat Legs, you're gonna wanna take us to wherever we want, 'cuz he ain't gonna let you not."

"I will cut stuff off of you," I spat hatefully, verifying Santo's statement, "They can't stop me."

I don't know if it was from the reality of currently being the vulnerable one, or if my second punch hit her hard enough to jar something loose, but Illyana suddenly ceased being the sadistic, spiteful demon we'd come to know over the last hour. Instead she seemed confused; afraid, "I... I can't. He sealed his castle from me. My magic... my powers... I can't," For perhaps the first time, she was looking at us. Specifically, what we were wearing – our uniforms. They must have been familiar enough to trigger something, "Who are you? Where's Kitty? Where are Dani and Sam? Please... where is my brother?"

The three of us looked at each other. I couldn't help but press my palm to my forehead, "You've got to be kidding me."