Well, I figure her sci-fi 'Kine-Tech' particles are essentially a bunch of particles that she can charge in various ways. They can interact with each other to form solids and so forth (like her physical body) and also be charged to emit energy and fry stuff, like lasers/etc. Or in this case, enter and incinerate a skull at a molecular level.

I'm sure there are plenty of holes in the actual science behind it, but I figure the particle clouds emitted from the towers have 2 requirements :

Power - they require energy to function / emit energy / be controlled. The more power the cloud can draw from a source (in this case the city's power station) the more powerful say, a laser could be fired.

Control - to micro and macro control a cloud of trillions of particles, you'd need a pretty potent (and intelligent) computer. That's KATE. The first AI with enough power to use them like she does.

You know, i'll actually make up a proper post explanation for how it all works. Been meaning to establish their 'rules' for a while now. So i'll get on it :D
Eventually i'd like to get into the details more in the actual comic, but for now this seems like a fun idea ^_^

Thanks!
This is more than enough explanation for my scientific heart :D

Yeah, that would be cool :D

Depending how far away from "sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic" you want to get?

It doesn't seem wholly implausible to me even with recent advances in particle physics (eg confirmation of Higgs field) that ways to manipulate the universe might be found, that would create and manage particles and energy, in the arbitrary future.

There's an awful lot of weird stuff once you're in the quantum level which probably allows for all sorts of things if we could only work out how to interact with it efficiently (and plenty of real world experiments even today showing some weird stuff).

It seems to me though that with that sort of power you could disable just about any physical weapon faced...

Well that is an utterly fantastic idea for some promo art, haha. Might have to use that!