There's a brief moment where his expression falters into oh my god, what is he doing?? before he snaps out of it and does what's expected of him. He snares it safely and passes it along as delicately as possible before grabbing it with his actual arms.

While he's occupying himself with that, the other whips that have nothing to do aren't idle. Several grab Jacob's fire-breathing assailant and bodily hurl him across the room, but in a calculated way that means his fall is broken.

By other people, to be fair. But it's not straight into a concrete wall, which is Magicman's current mood.

"Enough," he shouts, after a minute. The whips twist, falling apart only to reconnect themselves with new material and shift into a new composition (something metallic?). They slice against faces and torsos with calculated strikes, shallow but enough to draw blood and make people think twice about approaching. He moves closer to Jacob to make it very clear that new challengers aren't going to be appreciated.

Maybe it will work, but there's still a lot of them. And there's bound to be some with superpowers that can ignore what's basically a waving field of razor blades.