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Moment of Awesome - Hope Summers: During the siege of District X, Hope goes up against Death... and fails. The girl with the red hair stood in the street. She was always pale, but somehow the whipcord tension of her body made the contrast between her face and hair more prominent, tilted up toward the winter sky; the fists clenched at her sides with blanched knuckles. She swallowed, her throat moving, and seemed to steel herself, eyes closing, reaching for something unseen. When her eyes opened, light burst, and in the same moment, invisible forces moved: Not a wall, but a cube, crushing inward on itself with the man on the rooftop in the middle. To no effect. Death cocked his head as he felt something shudder through him: pressure, then release, like his ears popping at a high altitude. Someone had just tried something on him. Slowly, the Horseman straightened. The lack of any reaction - barely a twitch - and no sign of damage made the girl take a step back; ashamed, she planted her feet, her eyes fixed on the symbol on his chest. (That wasn't everything. Not even close.) The glow in her left eye grew brighter and more intense, and the buildings around the man rattled - glass shaking against windowpanes, fragments of concrete or brick tumbling down facades - as not a cube but something more like a telekinetic dodecahedron surrounded the man from all sides. Each face was a different strength and frequency, psionic energy adjusted on the fly to ensure that at least a few hit whatever was cancelling them out. The world around him seemed to shiver with heat-haze. Death raised a hand to press against the invisible wall as it grew closer, letting the force gently propel it back towards his chest as it advanced. The air took on a close, almost muffled quality as the construct began to compress, then compress again -- only to once more disappear the instant it met the resistance of Death's body. "Ah, telekinesis," he concluded. The blaze from Hope's eye didn't disguise the pure fear on Hope's face as Death absorbed what she had thought would be an undodgeable attack - and, in fact, he hadn't dodged it, because he hadn't needed to. She swallowed again, convulsively, and her head swung around, trying to spot someone she knew - preferably someone with Omega-level powers of a different type. But there wasn't anyone; in her panic, she didn't even clock if there were mutants nearby. She jogged further down the street, trying to get a better vantage. Her eyebrows creasing with effort, she tried again; but instead of pure telekinetic energy, this time the roof around Death roiled, cracking like rapid gunfire, and rolled upwards, rubble turned into projectile weaponry that shot at the lone figure with speed and precision. He was not having good luck with rooftops today, Death thought as he leapt away from the epicenter. The shrapnel bounced harmlessly from the instinctive telekinetic shield -- far less polished than the dodecahedron that had attempted to crush him, but just as strong. Even without the borrowed power it would have been little more than a nuisance, but the unseen telekinetic seemed intent on pressing the point. Death considered. His attacker was almost certainly somewhere with a direct sightline to the roof, likely facing towards the western wall if they had the right angle to see him from street level. He turned to scan the street and saw -- a light. And an aura. The Horseman narrowed his eyes, and vanished. Hope craned her neck, squinting, trying to see if it had worked - if it had had any effect at all. As she let the debris fall, she relaxed slightly; there was no sign of the Horseman still standing. He must be down. There was a faint gust of sulfur, and a voice directly behind her said: "Excuse me. Kindly desist." The small girl whirled around, choking back a scream, and took an instinctive step back, throwing up a telekinetic shield between them just as instinctively. Her eyes were a little too bright, and she swallowed convulsively. The sound of cracking surrounded them. Two chunks of concrete tore themselves from opposite ends of the street and slammed into Death, pinning him in the centre. Or such would have been the case had the Horseman not already teleported again, this time directly in front of Hope's shield. "We don't know each other," said Death, wholly unbothered by the crash of concrete harmlessly clattering to the ground behind him. His orange eyes burned within the sunken ridges of his death's head. "And as such I am willing to attribute this to a bit of high spirits. I advise you to be on your way before you force me to break a personal rule and beat a literal child." The shielding reassembled itself as the girl jerked back another few steps, tears now blatantly standing in her eyes - or at least the one visible, the other now a blaze of light. The girl had to swallow again before her voice would work; but in the background, rubble was beginning to float in a wide radius, and cracks not just in sidewalks but in the roadways were forming. “You’re going to end the world,” she said, her pitch wrong - afraid, not angry. "This particular part of it, certainly. Nothing to be done for it. There's no harvest without the wheat." Telekinetic counter-eddies began to pulse against the floating debris, a perfectly opposing force. Death's eyes burned cold. "If you insist on becoming one more stalk, on your own head be it."