Jack's head pounded worse than any ill-advised college bender had ever been able to accomplish. Surprising? No, since none of those had ended with his head in a puddle of its own blood with his arms twisted behind his back. And yet that failed to be the most pressing thing on his mind. Because neither had any of those ended with Maddie blinking at him with unfocused eyes and twitching limbs as a spirit monster stepped down on her chest.

"Get- get off of her!" Jack managed through his own grogginess: a concussion for sure. As much as it fanned the burning anger inside of Jack, it was no surprise that none of the spooks paid him any mind.

The skull-headed ghost was still talking down at Maddie, but Jack wasn't paying attention to the words. His eyes instead sought out the ghost holding the trigger. He needed to do something, to think of something, anything, to get them out of this.

He didn't know how much longer Maddie could hold out and he couldn't lose her. He needed to grab her and get them into the Fenton Family Assault Vehicle. But the tank must be parked at least five blocks back by now considering how far they had fought.

Maddie screamed again. Jack followed. He felt helpless. Every one of his muscles might as well have been jello under the overwhelming force of resolved ectoplasmic beings.

Individually, none of these ghosts besides old white face were even much of a challenge, but gathered together...

How could he and Maddie have miscalculated so badly?

… he knew the answer. It was because they lacked information. Whenever they had full invasions, Phantom had always come in, knocked around a few cronies, and taken down the leader just like that. It was a sound strategy. Minion ghosts like this needed direction. He and Maddie had thought they could do the same, completely failing to account for not only advantages Phantom had that they didn't, but also for the amount of effort Phantom actually put into it. It wasn't all rinse, wash, repeat. It was a give and take fight that involved getting hit as much as he hit. It had never been easy for him, wasn't that what he had been saying at that City Hall?

Jack didn't know how he felt about that.

Phantom was nothing but another ghost. Whatever effort he put into a fight drained away in an hour once his ectoplasm regenerated. It wasn't the same.

He didn't belong in the real world more than any other spook… but he also didn't belong any less than they did. So why was it he and Maddie had always gunned for Phantom first? Why had they made him their priority even when he was fighting the actively-troublesome spook of the day?

Easy.

Phantom fascinated them, and the two of them, above all, were scientists. Catching Phantom would provide an opportunity no other ghost could hope to match.

They had always been clear on their stance that Phantom was no hero, and he still believed it. Phantom was a ghost doing what ghosts did. Not a hero… but by their own standard neither were they. They were scientists doing what they did.

Regardless of anything else, the fact stood that if Phantom were here, this wouldn't be happening. Jack's head wouldn't be tacky with his own blood. Maddie wouldn't be lying gasping for breath as she spasmed with shock after shock.

"Stop!" he shouted again to equal effect as the first time.

"Hmm, well, it looks like the little missy is getting down to the last of her endurance," skull head drawled with a glowing white grin. Jack blinked away his blurry vision to look at Maddie's half-lidded eyes. Her slow blinking and deliberate labored breathing indicated consciousness, but Jack almost wished she would pass out. He could see that every inch of her was in pain. The ghosts had let go of her arms, and one of her hands was using the strength of a drunk newborn to hit and tug at the leg pushing down on her chest. Her open mouth gasped, but it couldn't take in air regardless of the electricity, not with the ghost pressing down on her sternum. Somehow, despite immobile features, the way the ghost's flashing green eyes narrowed into crescents made him seem amused. Jack growled somewhere in his chest even as his eyes filled with water, blurring his vision of the act.

"Ja… Ja…" The voice was croaked and all but inaudible, but Jack would never forget it.

"Maddie! Get off of her!"

"Ja…" Through his blurry vision, he saw her head tilt back upwards. "Plea… pl…"

"Please, please get off of her!" Jack finished for her, his tone completely changed as he begged the creature to relent. What hope was it, though? What was he going to do? Appeal to the humanity of something fundamentally inhuman?

"Just one more go, then," the warden announced. "Guard, if you wo-"

Screech

Jack couldn't see the vehicle at first, but he heard the familiar screech of treaded tires and he saw the bright green beam that crashed into the chest of the ghost holding Maddie down. The Fenton Family Assault Vehicle came into focus mere seconds afterward, bulldozing through ghostly minions and shooting it's artillery with power Jack had thought it hadn't had any more of.

The beams created chaos as ghosts dodged and were hit and thrown around the arena. Jack, however, only had eyes for Maddie. It took her a few seconds to realize her freedom. After she did, she took a few more breaths before attempting to prop herself up on her arms. It came to nothing, as she could only get her shoulders off the road before she collapsed back down.

The doors to the Assault Vehicle opened and spilling out came… teenagers. Teenagers holding fresh weaponry and led by…

"Jazz!"

"Dad!" Jazz kneeled and aimed her bazooka at the space above him, ridding him of his spectral burden.

Jack only felt the weight above him lightening so far as it allowed him to scramble away to Maddie's side. Jazz followed, shooting any ghost that got too close.

"Maddie!" Jack put a hand on her hair but didn't know what to do after that. Was it safe to move her? Was anything broken?

Maddie blinked up at him with hazy eyes and took a large stuttering breath.

"Jack…" She put one hand over Jack's, which he realized was fluttering over her stomach. "...Jazz." Her weak voice contrasted to the obvious urgency in it as her eyes snapped to her daughter.

"No time to talk." Jazz fiddled with a holster on her belt and took out a couple of small capsules that Jack recognized as fuel cells for their weaponry. "We need to get back to FentonWorks and regroup." She said, looking around over their heads.

Jack followed her gaze. The kids that had flooded out of the RV were shooting left and right, doing a good job of holding back the spooks, but they lost the element of surprise. They were young and far from trained in ghost hunting. Most of them looked like they had never so much as held a gun before. The ghosts started to regain lost ground.

"Here, dad." Jazz shook the hand she held the fuel cells in, regaining his attention. Jack took them and loaded them into his ectoguns without looking.

"Fentonworks is still safe?"

"Yes, it's out of all the battlezones. No one has even tried to get in yet, though there's no way to know how long that'll last."

Jack looked down at Maddie. Color leaked back into her face and she looked up at him with her characteristic steely glint.

"We need a new plan… we need…" She took a deep suturing breath, "well… he isn't relevant either way at this point… but we need to regroup," she finished a bit nonsensically. Jack nodded in agreement.

"Let's get everyone to safety," he said, picking up Maddie bridal style with as much care as he could manage.

"Everyone back to the RV!" Jazz shouted into her earpiece as the three of them made a rush for the vehicle. He got into the back with Maddie and, as the kids piled in, Jack found himself skimming over their different features. He didn't realize what he was looking for until the doors shut and Jazz skidded away over more than one spectral speed bump.

"Jazz, where's Danny? Is he okay?"

Maddie's hand fisted in Jack's jumpsuit, echoing his concern.

Jazz took an eye off the road to give them a look Jack couldn't decipher. Something unsure.

"I hope so."

…:::*:::...

Valerie's breathing reverberated through her frame, bringing her entire torso up with each inhale and legs buckling slightly with each exhale.

Her knees, despite her sitting on them, shook to the point they hit each other. Smoke hovered around her in the stale air and her visibility in the strong winds, dragging in snow and ice, decreased by the moment.

This is it.

Valerie shook her head. She kept having that thought and it refused to go away no matter how much she beat it down… and she could admit those beatdowns were getting less and less spirited. No wonder the idea kept getting back up.

But what else could she think? In the last few hours, the situation had gone from bad to worse to teetering on hopeless.

It was all she could do to keep her useless left arm tucked against her body and out of the way.

The behemoths had still failed to so much as acknowledge her beyond a few off-handed swats and tossed lightning bolts. At the very least, though, their fight was winding down.

In the beginning, it had seemed Vortex (and he had shouted his name so much she was forced to learn it) had the obvious upper hand. Undergrowth's plants were vulnerable to the shifting temperatures and withered and died repeatedly in the weather barrage and under Valerie's weapons. However, as fast as they died, Undergrowth summoned them back from beneath the concrete. For every vine felled to heat and cold and plasma blasts, it seemed two more grew back. Now Vortex's moves became tainted with heavy effort. His shots slowed down, his weather phenomenon grew more limited in scope, and the ecto-tornado that made up his body shrank as his power drained.

Undergrowth grabbed the waning storm and dragged him across a lopsided apartment complex. Rubble rained down with thunderclaps and a piercing screech.

The defeat of one ghost, even at the hands of another, should be a fair enough victory given the situation. However, Valerie knew that as soon as Undergrowth defeated Vortex, he would be free to set his sights on dominating the rest of the city. Which, in turn, meant his full attention would concentrate on Valerie.

She wouldn't last two minutes, regardless of how worn down the ghost was. Not in her condition. Her board buckled beneath her. The lights went off and the whirring stopped. Her heart caught in her throat as she freewill for thirty feet. Then the power switched back on with a sputter. Oh god.

The moment of reckoning grew closer and closer as Valerie watched Undergrowth wrap Vortex up in vines and pummel him over and over again. With each hit, wispy bits of Vortex dissipated into the atmosphere. The snow buffeting Valerie's visor began to melt as the wet chill of rain washed through the cracks of her suit. The blood frozen to her shoulder began to flow down her arm and off the sides of her hoverboard. One last bolt of lightning struck and the torrential rain softened into droplets. Her restored visibility allowed Valerie to see as a tornado ghost the size of a normal person dropped from a thick green vine and fell behind some buildings. A dust cloud exploded outwards and the sound of falling rubble echoed. He didn't reappear.

Valerie took a deep breath. Without her suit's heating functions, she could do nothing to clear the remaining raindrops off her visor. Still, she could see, distorted through the water, as Undergrowth picked himself up to his full thirty story height. Vines spiraled out of the ground, curling around his torso and reinforcing his frame where Vortex had damaged it.

"Once again, I, Undergrowth, have proved myself the superior force of nature! Rain or shine, my plant's shall inherit the earth!" The ghost's voice reverberated through the air and straight into Valerie's gut.

The monster turned his head past her metaphorical barrier, his hand moving as if to gesture. Valerie knew she couldn't let him complete the motion. She didn't know if one of the cracks in her helmet would explain why her cheeks were wet.

If she looped around his arm she could potentially get close to his face. From there… a hurdle to be jumped when she got to it.

Valerie didn't say anything as she willed her damaged board forward at its fastest available speed.

Her plan didn't even make it to stage one.

"What? Ah! A measly insect come to infect instead of pollinate?" The hand changed its trajectory to swat her out of the sky from the side. She saw it coming, but with the delayed processing power of her board, she couldn't evade with her usual finesse. Her vision filled with green. A flash of white and a deep roar filled her senses. It took Valerie's mind a moment to catch up.

The hand had stopped, mere feet from her face. Following the arm to the joint, the ghost's shoulder was encased in-

Zoom-Crack!

With the speed of a bullet, something tore through the center of the frozen shoulder, leaving a hole in the middle surrounded by widening fractures until the whole thing shattered. The arm fell two hundred feet to lay in a cradle of two crushed buildings.

"Are you alright?"

Valerie looked back up into two assessing green eyes.

The ghost boy didn't look like he used to. In the place of the wide smile and confidant shoulders that used to drive her crazy, he floated with tired eyes and a hard face. That said, he didn't look like he had at City Hall all those months ago either. The dark green bags under his eyes and sallow look to his cheeks had disappeared. His round face and tanned skin made him look more alive than he had since she first met him as a freshman. His voice sounded different as well, his hard tone would have left a bad feeling in her gut before, but the circumstances of his appearance made it difficult for her to feel anything but relief. Still, his tone made it clear he asked after her as more a professional courtesy than actual concern.

Fair enough.

She took her hand off her shoulder, feeling the blood squelch between her fingers.

"I'll live," she managed past the pain. She didn't know if her statement rang with honesty or not, mostly because she herself didn't know if it was the truth. The ghost boy cracked a smile.

"I won't. But I guess we have to give this a try anyway." He turned back to Undergrowth. The ghost roared as the sound of a thousand suspension bridges collapsing accompanied the regrowth of his arm.

"I guess we do," she said, realizing he didn't feel the same dread she did. This situation, these odds, were nothing new to him. "Do… do you have an idea?" she murmured. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye with a raised eyebrow.

"Vortex had the right idea, but couldn't get to the right place. You can freeze Undergrowth and he can regenerate all day. What you really want are the roots." He lifted a hand and snow crystals danced above his palm. "I'm going to freeze his torso and go down for the roots. I need you to destroy what's left above ground as I do it."

Valerie nodded, eyes fixed on the plant ghost's torso. She found concentrating on her new target easier than looking Phantom in the eyes.

Everything after that happened in a blurred rush.

Phantom dove downwards. Valarie had been trying to avoid crashing downwards for so long now that she had a warning half out of her mouth before she remembered his intangibility. She shook her head and looked up at the ghost, who in turn searched for Phantom. His eyes landed on her.

"Hunter! You think a mere meat creature can stand up to my might? You are not worthy even as a pollinator! Your body shall be fertilizer for my children!"

Um. Ew.

Guessing his next move, Valerie preemptively darted to the left and up, not wanting to be caught sitting still. Her instinct proved its value when a vine swatted the spot she had been in. In return, she blasted it and darted away again.

"Why you- Ugh!" Undergrowth's body jerked from its base to its head and Valerie knew Phantom had done his part. Now things were up to her.

She took a deep breath and charged straight for the torso. On the way, she blasted any and all vines she could see, relieved when they didn't seem to grow back.

Halfway there, her board gave a stutter. Three-quarters of the way, the guns whined and sputtered before going out completely. That didn't matter. The sharp tip would do its job. Valerie's momentum and weight impacted with the slimy green mass of the plant ghost. The world went dark for too many seconds before she burst back into the light. Green goop sopped down her faceplate. The same wet substance seeped through the cracks of her armor and crept down her spine and stuck to the hair on her body. None of that mattered, though, because behind her the ghost gave a graveyard screech. The entire atmosphere shook as his body crumpled to the ground. A million vacuum cleaners roared as the vines slurped back into their center, leaving crushed buildings, dirt, and dead weeds to litter the landscape.

They had done it. They had actually done it. Valerie's cheeks hadn't been dry for hours, but now the water that joined them felt almost cleansing. She took a deep breath and tried to use her uninjured arm to wipe some of the gunk off her visor. Wearing a metal gauntlet made it pretty much a moot task, but she did at least manage to gain enough visibility to see the blurry shapes of the earth below her. That didn't serve her heart well when her board gave another start and freefell twenty feet. She had just managed to catch her breath after that scare when it did it again… thirty feet, forty, fifty... it took sixty feet for her to realize it wasn't turning back on.

Her stomach fell up into her throat. Her heart beat double-time against her ribcage. The air whistling past her ears deafened her and the wind bit into her skin under her suit.

The ground approached.

"Woah!" A jerk of Valerie's body starting from her arms. An explosion in her injured shoulder as the muscle ripped away from the bone. A crash. Metal screeching and twisting around concrete shards and shattered glass. "Shit, sorry."

In between her sobs, Valerie opened her eyes. The world around her was still green, but she could see that she floated twenty feet above the ground. There were hands under her biceps, holding her up. Phantom.

The two of them floated downwards until they landed on a somewhat flat piece of a decimated building. Valerie's legs wouldn't support her, so the hands helped her sink into a sitting position. Deep breaths. It was over. Deep breaths. Her breathing echoed in the otherwise silent part of town. Completely silent. No screams. No cries. Valerie shuttered. Her breath came in tasting of tree sap and iron and salt. A screeching sound joined her breathing. It took her a moment to realize it was her working hand pulling apart the already broken clasp of her headgear. Her helmet hit the ground with a metallic clatter.

With her restored vision, she looked up at Phantom where he floated in front of her. There were a million things she wanted to say, some accusatory, some cruel, some sad. She didn't say any of them.

"Let me get your arm." Phantom lifted a hand covered in ice crystals.

"Okay."

Her left arm fell against her body, half torn off, she was sure, though she couldn't bring herself to look. Come to think about it, that might be a good explanation for the cloudiness of her thoughts and the labor of her breathing.

Phantom drifted closer. His hand hovered above her before making contact. She bit her lip, though that didn't stop the scream.

"This is going to need a professional. Like, surgery or something," Phantom said, more to himself than anything.

"Phantom," Valerie croaked out.

"Hmm?"

"Phantom. I… we… I can't…" He finished icing up her arm, hopefully preventing her from bleeding out, and leaned back to look her in the eye. She could only see the green glow of his eyes and a shock of blurry white surrounded by the grey and mauve of destruction.

"Red Huntress? Red Huntress," She slumped. His hands on her shoulders might have been the only things keeping her upright. Ectoplasm and plant sap glued her hair to her face and neck.

"Phantom. I'm, we're…"

"Valerie!"

"Well, well, well. Seems the little hero can't help sticking his nose in everybody's business."

That wasn't Phantom's voice. Valerie blinked once, then twice. When her eyes opened again, Phantom's glowing green eyes were out of her line of sight. Valerie slumped forward again. Her forehead came to rest against something soft but solid. Hands held her shoulders.

"Plasmius."

Plasmius? Ghost? Vlad! She had to… she had to…

A/N: After 38 chapters and more than 80,000 words, here we finally have Jack pov. New povs introduced three chapters from the end? A+. good writing. wow. amazing. vkusno. -.-

Also, I'm going to stop trying to guess how many more chapters there will be, clearly I'm not good at it. At least three.

In other news, updates might slow down. Ever since I came off hiatus in January, I've had very detailed outlines of what i wanted to happen in the story drawn up and I've been following them. From this point forward, my notes become pretty vague. I still know what I want to happen, just not in as much detail. That, combined with the fact that I'm not really active in the DP fandom outside of this story right now makes it hard to work up the drive and inspiration to write it. :-( I'll obviously try my best, but I'm sorry if I can't stick to my once a month regimen. And hey, this chapter is double the length of my average chapter. So it's kind of like getting a double update, right?