The figure standing next to him looked particularly childlike in stature, wearing the armor he had worn before his evolution or puberty and swimming in wide-legged pants, holding a hammer that almost matched her height at her side, distorting the image further. Not that she seemed to feel as small as she appeared; she stood rigidly straight, free hand on her hip and masked chin up, but she didn't care to look up to the empty sky with Alex.
At the eye of the storm, the anxiety that thrummed through the city was at its peak. Not a single bird remained, flocks still visible over the river as they fled, dark clouds warped by the smoke and lick of fires that spread rapidly and the glint and shimmer of the glass that littered the streets from broken windows, windshields, lamps and headlights. Not that Alex had meant one with feathers. A particularly violent scuffle broke out to their right, drawing the child warrior's sharp gaze toward a dozen men scattering blood and teeth over the sidewalk in front of an electronics store, beating each other savagely and growing more manic with every heavy impact of bone and flesh. They were going to need more victims soon. Already, they were throwing their weight Alex's way, spilling off of the sidewalk into the littered street, then barrelling blindly toward the next easy target. The ground trembled, knocking jagged glass teeth loose from windowpanes, and Daisy raised her hammer, eyes glowing blue, and swung. Everything looked wrong here. It was hard to see through a tunnel of black and sheen of red.