Extermination 8.4

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I got my orders and left behind a bizarre scene where Armsmaster was working hand in hand with Kaiser, of all people.  Kaiser worked to build the same sort of trap that he’d imprisoned Lung in, some time ago, creating bars of metal between and around each of Leviathan’s limbs, a cage tight to the body.  Rune and another telekinetic were working to bend the metal from Kaiser’s shaken barrier around Leviathan’s limbs and face.

It wouldn’t last.  Leviathan was too big, his tail extended a long distance behind him, and it was thin and supple enough to slip through almost any barrier Kaiser could erect, strong enough that it could bend metal.  Leviathan would get free, there could be no illusions on that front.

While Kaiser worked, Armsmaster was simultaneously ensuring that he could maximize the damage delivered the second Leviathan moved again.  Gingerly, he worked with the grenades the Protectorate had liberated from Bakuda, the same explosives Miss Militia had been firing at Leviathan, and hooked them up as motion activated or proximity mines.  A complicated affair, I imagined, when your target could start moving any second, and when you couldn’t fully know or understand what the individual bombs did.

In the end, though, it was still our best bet to do one final measure of damage against Leviathan before he was free to wreak havoc once more.

There were a little more than fifty of us left.  Hookwolf, Fenja, Menja, Genesis, Aegis and Manpower were among the fifteen or so standing combatants that remained and were able to go toe to toe with Leviathan.  Parian, the girl in the doll costume, had formed some massive stuffed animals – a lion and a pig that stood as tall as Leviathan’s shoulder.  Tougher than they looked, according to her.  I had my doubts.  I mean, it wasn’t just that they were stuffed animals, but according to Parian, this was her first fight.

Too many others were capable of delivering the hurt, but were too fragile: Browbeat, Shadow Stalker, Lady Photon, Purity, Laserdream, Brandish and others I didn’t know.  The Ward with the crossbow, some guy with crimson skin.  There was a light show in the sky above as Kid Win teleported in pieces of the cannon he’d had at the bank robbery, manifesting them onto a hovering platform set directly in front of Leviathan.  He’d get anywhere from a few seconds to a minute’s worth of concentrated fire with the gun firing on the highest settings, directing a beam through a gap in the bars to where Narwhal’s razor sharp forcefield had opened a gap in Leviathan’s neck.

Beyond those first few moments after Leviathan woke up, it woul be anyone’s guess.

I hurried away from the site Armsmaster had indicated to me, my right hand on my left elbow, keeping my arm from moving too much.  Sector CC-7, a block and a half South, a block West.  So strange, to think that this was an area I’d walked through a dozen times, on my way to or from the Loft.  Now I was looking at it as a battlefield, trying to figure out what routes Leviathan would take.  What things I had to watch out for – the grates leading down to the storm sewers, the rain barrel on top of one of the buildings that might or might not be intact enough to retain any water in it.  Puddles.

Stuff I could use…  hardly.

It wasn’t like there was any weapon I could deploy, no feature of the terrain I could use to deliver the critical blow.  This was Leviathan.  A creature that had killed more people in the last 12 years than I had even seen in my entire life.  Seen in person, anyways.

I was scared.  A huge part of me wanted to just close my eyes and hope Leviathan didn’t come, that I wouldn’t have to deal with him.  It would be nice to join the three hundred and fifty thousand other Brockton Bay residents that were trusting the heroes to handle things, find a peace of sorts in surrender and helplessness.  Except I couldn’t.  I’d seen firsthand how Leviathan had taken down some of the strongest capes.  I couldn’t find refuge in that kind of trust anymore.  My mental and emotional resources were better spent on figuring out how to help than they were on hope.

I was hurting, too.  The only thing keeping the throb of my arm from consuming my attention was the fear.  It was a kind of grim cycle:  the pain reminded me of why I should be scared, but the emotion and the adrenaline kept the pain as this intensely unpleasant background chatter in my brain, where it might have crippled me otherwise.  It was a teetering balance that had me on edge in a way I’d never experienced to this degree.  There were probably people who lived for that hypervigilant, heart-racing, brain-going-in-overtime experience.  I wasn’t one of them.

Priorities.  Back to what I was thinking about – there obviously wasn’t anything to be found here that would win me a fight against Leviathan or even hurt him.  Ridiculous to think that way.  Any advantages to be gained would be ones that kept me alive.

I wiped the beads of water from my lenses with my glove, which only seemed to divide each of them into a mess of smaller droplets.  Leviathan was bigger than me, stronger, faster, tougher.  I had to think like a mouse who might run into a murderous cat at any moment.  Like prey.  Use my small size.  Hide.  I needed a position that kept me out of sight, gave me a good vantage point, but left me free to make a run for it.  A spot where I had an escape route if things got bad.  To top it off, in the event Eidolon couldn’t stop the wave, I could also do with cover.

It was the sort of street you saw often enough in the Docks.  Large buildings lined either side, like giant boxes made of concrete or brick.  I could have maybe found a fire escape to climb up, in the hopes that I’d be out of reach of the wave, but my experience with Lung back on day one had taught me better.  The higher ground was an advantage, sure, but if your opponent could get up or down from that location faster and more easily than you could, that stopped being an asset really damn quickly.  If there was anything that was going to be useful, it would be on ground level.  I saw a rusted van that had sat in front of an old workshop since I’d first passed through this area, all tires flat, windows broken, interior gutted.  A chain link fence stretched between two buildings, but someone had cut the wires that connected the fence to the frame, so half of it was curled back and waving slightly in the wind and rain.

No, those things weren’t useful.  Larger scale?  There was an old roof supported by two pillars, attached on one side to a building, a carport, perhaps.  The roof was mostly intact, corrugated steel with a smallish hole in one lower corner, which meant the area beneath it was largely dry, but for a small puddle.  It was also exposed on three sides, which meant I couldn’t stay there.  My bugs could.  It was a place they could keep dry until I needed them.

I’d been acutely aware of my bugs since the battle started, and for the second time I could remember, I found my power was responding far more effectively as I called for them.  My reach extended further, my bugs were fractionally more responsive.  The last time this had been the case, it had been when I teamed up with Bitch, Sundancer and Newter and wound up fighting Oni Lee and Lung.  I couldn’t explain it, but I wasn’t going to complain.  I needed every small advantage I could get.

As they began gathering under the carport, my mind returned to that notion of being successful ‘prey’.

When I’d originally designed my costume, I’d picked the darker colors, made sure that the varieties of chitin I used to make the armor were spaced out so the individual shading would retain some ‘speckling’ after being painted, all for a reason.  Camouflage.  I’d known I’d have my bugs all around me.  I’d known I would be standing in the midst of them while they gathered into swarms, would have them crawling on me from time to time.  So I’d picked darker colors and made my armor mottled to blend in with the bugs that were, obviously, specks.

Just hiding inside my swarm wouldn’t be enough.  Too easy for him to attack just the one cluster, tear through me.

So I gathered more than one smaller swarm, clustering them in areas where it was dry.  The interior of the rusted van, under eaves, in doorframes and on a roof, under a large rain barrel.

Then, struck by a little inspiration, I condensed the nine swarms into human-ish shapes.  Black silhouettes crouched, stood tall with arms akimbo, leaned against walls, leaned partially outside the driver’s side window of the van.  In the gloom, through the rain, it was deceptive.  Deceptive enough?  I couldn’t be sure.

I felt the bite of cold air.  A chill breeze, going straight through the soaked fabric of my costume.  When I looked down to where the long road sloped to the edge of the water, I saw the reason for the chill.  Eidolon was flying at the coast, focusing blue rays on the water around the shattered boardwalk and debris at the water’s edge, hardening the waves into irregular sheets and glacier-like formations of ice.

Dangerous.  I could remember seeing on TV that they’d tried something like this a few years ago.  A Tinker using an ice engine, I think.  I didn’t know exactly how or why, but judging by the fact that they hadn’t used the tactic again, I got the impression It had turned out really badly.

My guess was based on the notion that hydrokinesis was the movement of water, and ice was just water in another form.  It wasn’t that Leviathan would levitate the chunks of ice.  Nothing so blatant.  Rather, when a tidal wave did break through the ice, rolled up onto the battlefield with frozen shards and chunks caught up in the current, Leviathan might move those chunks a little faster in the wave’s passage, make them hit a little harder, and give them a tendency to strike where they could do the most damage.

That was my suspicion, anyways.  The heroes didn’t exactly dish out the full details at press conferences, afterward, so I could only make an educated guess.

Either way, it was a delaying tactic.  Holding off the damage, in the hopes that we could end this or get reinforcements before Brockton Bay became another Newfoundland.

We were hoping for Scion.  The first cape, the golden skinned man.  The guy that could go toe to toe with an Endbringer and win, if things hadn’t already gone too far south.  If Behemoth hadn’t already turned the area into a radioactive, magma-ridden wasteland.  If Leviathan hadn’t built up enough momentum with his waves.  If the Simurgh… Ok, the Simurgh was different, I had to admit.  The issue with her wasn’t so much winning the battle.  It was what came after.  Win every battle against her, lose the war, more or less.

The problem with waiting on Scion was that the guy wasn’t exactly in touch with the rest of us.  There was speculation he had at least one human contact – someone that had given him clothing and a costume, at least – but he never bothered to stop long enough for anyone to pass on any requests, to tell him to go to X place when we gave him Y signal.  He rescued people twenty-four-seven, three hundred and sixty five days a year, handling crises only as they came to his attention, which meant that sometimes an Endbringer came and Scion was wholly occupied with saving sinking ships, stopping landslides and putting out housefires.  I wondered what he was doing now.

My swarms were in place, which left me having to decide where to hide.  The carport was too in the open, none of the eaves left me a good enough escape route, and as for the space under the rain barrel on the roof, well, I wasn’t that stupid, and I’d already dismissed the roof as an option anyways.

I started toward the rusted van.  I was halfway there when I reconsidered.  As comforting as it might be to have the safety of metal around me and to be more or less concealed, it posed some of the same problems as the rooftops.  If things turned sour or if an unexpected situation arose, I’d be trapped.

After a moment of tense consideration, I reluctantly decided on the carport, hunkering down in the gloom and hoping the shadows there would help conceal me.  It offered me an escape route – around the back of the building, or through the side door, it gave me cover from the rain and any debris, and it gave me concealment.  I’d have to cope with the lack of cover from any incoming waves or Leviathan himself.

Secure in the amount of bugs around me, I collected the ones that could go out in the rain and manage reasonably well.  Primarily roaches.  I sent them out in the general direction of where Leviathan and the others were.  The better a sense I had of any imminent encounters, the better I could react.

Manpower deceased, CD-6.  Aegis deceased, CD-6, my armband spoke, at the same moment my bugs reached the area around where Leviathan had been.

He was awake again.

Aegis would have been covering an aerial route, keeping Leviathan from heading to the rooftops, which meant Leviathan went up.  I had the mass of roaches ascend, trying to get a sense of his location.  I tried to use my armband to help gauge the direction he was traveling, but since I couldn’t move my arm, it was difficult at best.

Fenja down, CC-6.  My head snapped up.

I found them.  Fenja and Menja were duking it out with Leviathan.  Both were nearly as big as he was, which was saying a fair bit.  I knew their power warped geometry to make them bigger, simultaneously reduced the effective size of incoming attacks by an inversely proportionate amount.  Six times as tall and a sixth of the hurt, on top of the benefits of being bigger.

Fenja deceased, CC-6.

It wasn’t doing them a lot of good.  Not Fenja, anyways.

I saw a light as Kid Win rose above the level of the buildings, fired a painfully bright beam down at the Endbringer.  After the laser petered out, he rose up higher again, to keep out of reach.  He was in the middle of firing another beam when the laser flicked around nearly three hundred and sixty degrees, spun by a massive impact.

Kid win down, CC-6.

And then Leviathan was in view, entering the same street I was on.  As if to herald his coming, a massive wave crashed hard against the barrier of ice Eidolon had erected around the wrecked Boardwalk, the spray seemingly reaching nearly to the stormclouds above.

One shoulder was bloated, five times the normal size, twisted, like it was covered in elephantine tumors, bleeding openly.  He was injured in other places, had a hole through the side of his stomach, a larger blackened wound at the base of his neck, and a fifth of his face was missing, torn off below the cheekbone.  He didn’t seem to be suffering much.  He held Kaiser’s upper torso in the one claw, tossed it casually to one side.  The man’s legs were nowhere to be seen.

Wait, what?  I hadn’t heard the report on Kaiser’s death.  I checked my armband, where my arm hung immobile at my side.

It was dead, offline.  Black screen.

I didn’t have another second to worry – Leviathan was extending one claw in my general direction.

The water that had pooled shallowly beneath the carport trickled his way, as if it were moving downhill, gathered in a rising bulge of water on the street in front of the carport, swelling to five feet in height, fifteen feet across.

Unsure what to do, I remained absolutely still.

A movement of his claw, and the bulge broke, spilled to one side as an onrushing wave.  It swept beneath the rusted van, suddenly rose to heave the vehicle in Leviathan’s direction.  The van rolled once, skidding toward the Endbringer, threatening to strike one leg out from under him.  He stopped it by punching it through the roof, into the front end of the van.  He stabbed the other claw through at the same point, tore the van into two halves that he tossed to either side of him.

A flick of his tail, and he sent a blade of water slashing through the air at the rain barrel, slicing through the swarm and stilts.  The barrel crashed to the rooftop, and water cascaded out.  A twisting movement of his claw, and that cascade of water flowed off the roof in a small, controlled wave, moving like a speeding car, straight towards the carport on the other side of the street, toward me.

I caught a glimpse of Leviathan rearing back in reaction to something as I legged it, left my swarm behind as I ran perpendicular to the wave’s direction, away from Leviathan.  I leaped as I felt it make contact with the swarm, felt it slam into my legs a fraction of a second after.

I’d cleared enough ground that the angle of the hit didn’t throw me straight into the side of the building.  I was thrown a distance, rolled on my side, on top of and over my probably-broken arm.

Pain consumed me.  I writhed, my good hand pressing on my bad arm.  I gagged, pulled my mask up to throw up, as if my body was trying to find some way to rebel against the pain.  I tried to climb to my feet, but I was too weak, dizzy, and my good arm gave out.  I landed face first in dirty water.

I had no idea how long it took me to pull myself together.  It could have been two minutes, it could have been ten seconds.  I managed to climb to my feet.  Stumble back toward the carport, staying to the shadows.

As I approached the corner of the building, I saw Armsmaster fighting toe to toe with Leviathan, a Halberd in each hand.  One was similar to the one he’d used the night we attacked the fundraiser, capable of unfolding into a grappling hook, the other was simpler, a dull stainless steel from tip to butt end, with no decoration or style to it.  The head was surrounded by a strange blur that seemed static, unmoving around the blade and point.

Leviathan slapped his tail at Armsmaster’s legs, and Armsmaster leaped over it, swiped out with the blurry Halberd.  It carved a chunk out of Leviathan, left a cloud of dust that the rain quickly drove down into the expanse of water beneath them.  The Endbringer reared back in pain, and Armsmaster stepped forward, leaped up higher than any normal human could, and caught Leviathan just above the knee with the Halberd, driving the blade nearly a third of the way to the bone.

Leviathan retaliated, swiping at Armsmaster, but the hero planted a foot on the uninjured part of the knee, and kicked himself back and out of the way.  The afterimage followed him, and he swiped at it with the other Halberd.  The blade erupted with a flame like a giant purple blowtorch, turning the worst of the afterimage into steam before it could crush him.  He turned his back so the steam didn’t billow against the exposed flesh of his face.  Some remains of the afterimage struck his armor, but he slid back and rolled with the impact, keeping his feet on the ground the entire time, enabling him to leap and roll to one side as Leviathan’s tail came down from behind and directly above him.

Leviathan was badly injured.  Ichor poured from six large wounds that hadn’t been there when he’d arrived on the street.

“You dumb brute,” Armsmaster growled.  He was panting for breath.  “Every fight you’ve done so far, that we’ve got on camera?  I’ve watched it, put it through programs.  I’ve got a computer on my back that’s relaying to a supernetwork, noting your every move, using subsonic pulses to read every aspect of the street, the surrounding buildings, every feature of the terrain.  I know exactly what you’re going to do next – you’re going to try to catch me from behind with a wave.”

Leviathan lunged, swiped with the oversized claw.  Armsmaster rolled to one side, then swung both Halberds behind him to intercept the wave that was coming from behind, vaporize it.

“You don’t even speak English, do you?  Or you’d know what I was saying, you’d know I already won.  The others helped, slowing you down, stopping the waves.  But this victory, this killing blow?  It’s going to be mine.”

Leviathan lunged, stopped, letting his water echo get ahead of him, then lunged again, a half second later.  Armsmaster leaped out of the way of the echo, drew his knees to his chest to avoid a claw swipe while he was still airborne, and sent his grappling hook between Leviathan’s feet to pull himself to the ground in a flash.  He skidded with the momentum, right between Leviathan’s legs, and raised the blurry Halberd to strike Leviathan between the legs, against the first ten feet of Leviathan’s tail.  The tail was turned to dust where the blade made contact, the plumes of it briefly obscuring Armsmaster.

“This cloud around my blade?  Nanotechnology.  Nano-structures engineered to slide between atoms, sever molecular bonds.  Cuts through anything.  Everything.  Like a sharp knife through air.”

Leviathan whipped his tail at Armsmaster.  Armsmaster stepped out of the way, slapped at the tail with the broad side of the blade.  More dust, another chunk of flesh gone, ichor pouring from the injury.  He ducked the echo as though it were an idle afterthought.

Leviathan turned to run.  Armsmaster sent out one blade like a grappling hook, circled the smaller of the Endbringer’s claws with the chain.  Leviathan moved, oblivious or uncaring, and Armsmaster waited until the slack was out of the chain, pressed a button.

The chain and Halberd ceased moving, and even Leviathan’s strength ceased to move it.  Rather than pull away, the Endbringer skidded, fell on his back, wrist still held by the chain.

A half second later, the chain went briefly slack, then rigid again as Armsmaster reeled himself in. He drove the blurry blade straight into Leviathan’s face with all the force of his forward momentum.  He pulled it free, slashed again, then freed the chain and used it to pull himself across the street, out of reach of Leviathan’s violent response.

Armsmaster called out, “Let’s see how quickly you respond to classical conditioning.  Every time you try to run, I’ll do something like that.”

Leviathan had no reply.  He simply climbed to his feet, swiped a claw through the air.  Armsmaster parried the afterimage that sailed through the air toward him, using the purple flame.

“For the record, that last trick was a temporal stasis trigger, with thanks owed to the cooperation of a subordinate of mine.  Drains my battery reserves, but you don’t understand that, do you?”

Leviathan lunged, and Armsmaster fired out the grappling hook, stopped it in mid air by freezing it in time.  Leviathan ran himself through on the chain, the thing spearing deep into his neck and out the back of his torso.  Uncaring, the Endbringer continued to charge at Armsmaster.

Armsmaster let the chain go slack, ducked a swipe of the tail, leaped forward and to one side to avoid the claw that followed.  Another small hop and roll ensured he moved right beneath the afterimage, and he made two swipes with the blurry Halberd at the back of Leviathan’s thighs as he passed behind the Endbringer.  His chain reeled in, pulled free of Leviathan’s neck wth a spray of blood, came down and across Leviathan’s hip to snap back to the top of the Halberd.  He fired it off again to get himself more distance, pulling himself across the street, spinning to face Leviathan once more as he stopped.

He passed one Halberd to the other hand, so he held two, wiped some frothing spittle from his mouth with his gauntlet.  “I am going to be the one to take your head, abomination.  I can only hope you know mortal terror in your last moments, know what you’ve inflicted on so many others.”

Leviathan stood, straighted itself, touched its claw to its ruined face, then its neck.  The amount of blood it was losing – it seemed somehow more than Leviathan should have been able to contain within himself.  I mean, he was big, but this was a lot of blood.

For several long seconds, Leviathan didn’t move.

“Delaying, buying time for a tsunami?” Armsmaster laughed, and Leviathan cocked his head at the display of emotion.  “No.  Three point four minutes before the next big wave breaks through the ice.  Dragon’s probes are giving me the data on that.  This will be over before then.”

He stepped forward, then stepped again, waiting for some cue from Leviathan.  On Armsmaster’s third step, Leviathan took a small step back, lashed his tail behind him.

“Finally scared?” Armsmaster taunted.  “Good.”

Nausea and pain was welling up in me again as I watched from the corner of the building, under the carport, threatening to override my sense of awe.  It was all I could do to keep quiet, keep from distracting Armsmaster, or distracting Leviathan and throwing some wrench in Armsmaster’s data.  The last thing I wanted was to become the hostage that made Armsmaster hesitate for the fraction of a second that cost him -cost us all-  the fight.

Armsmaster went on an all-out offensive, slashing as fast as his arm could move, cutting leg, knee, tail, leg again, moving out of the way of Leviathan’s attacks as though it were easy.  For ten seconds he continued, relentless.

“I should thank you, monster,” Armsmaster spoke, after he’d just finished a backflip that had carried him near enough to Leviathan’s torso to strike the creature across the lower belly.

Leviathan lunged, dropping to all fours, as if trying to swamp Armsmaster with a huge volume of water by way of his afterimage.  Armsmaster was already casting his grappling hook out, pulling himself out of the way.  In the final moment before he pulled away, his other Halberd swung up and into Leviathan’s neck, making a wound mirroring the spot where Narwhal’s forcefield had cleaved deep, the one Kid Win had undoubtedly opened wider with his laser turret.  Armsmaster reeled the hook back in.

The Endbringer turned, as if to run, only for the loop of the grappling hook’s chain to pass under his ‘chin’.  Armsmaster heaved himself up and onto the Endbringer’s back, drove the Halberd into one side of the neck, lengthening the cut he’d just made.  He stepped on the top of the Endbringer’s head, leaped down, catching the Endbringer across the face with the Halberd as he descended.  Leviathan collapsed, going spread-eagle.

Armsmaster slashed at Leviathan’s forearms as the Endbringer started to clmb to his feet.  More damage done, though it didn’t stop Leviathan from rising.  While Armsmaster pressed the attack, his armband hissed with a message I couldn’t make out.  I glanced at mine – still broken.

“This will be over before then,” Armsmaster echoed an eariler statement, speaking more to himself than to the armband or Leviathan.

Leviathan hopped backwards to create some distance, staggered a little as the more injured of his two legs failed to take his weight, used his smaller hand to stop from falling a second time, poising himself on three limbs.

Armsmaster used his grappling hook to haul himself close, readying to make another slash for the neck.  He changed his mind as the ground rumbled, pulled the hook free to latch it on a garage door.  Countering his forward momentum, he swung himself to one side of the road, staying out of Leviathan’s reach.

The ground rumbled again, brief, intense, stopped.

Armsmaster touched a hand to the side of his visor, and I thought I saw his lips crease in a frown before he turned his head away from me.

Another fierce rumble, and a crack appeared like a seam down the center of the street, a straight line as far as I could see in either direction.

Leviathan raised his claw, and the road suddenly split, heaving upward as a concrete pipe wide enough to fit a man crested from the pavement like a whale rising from the waves.  A second later, water gushed forth, veering toward Armsmaster.

The storm sewers.

Armsmaster hesitated, then threw his grappling-hook-Halberd forward into the onrushing waves like a javelin.  The gush of water froze in time, and he leapt forward, stepping on the furthermost extensions of the immobile spray in a parkour-style ascent over the water and the pipe.  The water resumed its regular motion as Armsmaster took his final leaping step off the top, heading straight for Leviathan.

Leviathan moved faster than he had in the last minute, caught the blade in his claw.

Dust rose from the claw as the blade sank deep, blood poured out, but the blade remained fixed in place.  Armsmaster tugged, failed to dislodge it.  He tried to pull away, but I could see Leviathan had caught onto his hand and wrist with his clawtips, while the Halberd sat embedded in his ‘palm’.

“How!?” Armsmaster roared.

I didn’t hesitate a moment in sending out my bugs.  Three swarms, shaped like people, more as a general cloud.  The bugs all sagged beneath the drenching rain, the ones on top taking the brunt of the downpour.

Leviathan planted one foot beside Armsmaster for balance, reached out with his free claw, and pressed the tips against the side of Armsmaster’s throat and torso.  Still holding on to Armsmaster’s hand and wrist, he pushed against the side of the man’s body.  Armsmaster screamed, a frantic noise that seemed to redouble in urgency with every breath.  He tipped over and fell with a splash.

The Endbringer stood, showing none of the frailty or pain it had been displaying seconds ago.  The injuries were there, to be sure, his head hung at an angle because of the way the weight of his head hung on the intact portions of his neck, but he wasn’t suffering, had no trouble putting his full weight on his more injured leg.  Had it been an act?

The Endbringer dropped Armsmaster’s arm and Halberd, where the weight of the metal armor and device pulled them beneath the water.  A lash of his tail dispatched two of my three swarms.  He watched, seeming not to care, as the third ran up to him, smashed against his leg.  The bugs spreading out, burying themselves deep into his injuries. I was hoping to find some weakness, devour him from the inside out, but the bugs might as well have been biting on steel.  Nothing budged beneath their jaws, their stings couldn’t penetrate.

He turned, crouched, bolted West, away from the coast, full speed.

I hurried to Armsmaster’s side.

“You,” he groaned.  His left arm was gone at the shoulder, torn out of the socket.  Blood poured from the wound.  “You’re dead.”

“Hey, you’re not making any sense.”

“He killed you.”

Had my armband announced my death when it glitched out and died?  Assumed total destruction of my unit, and me with it?

“I’m alive.  Listen, I’m going to try and find your arm, my armband got broken, maybe something got dislodged when Leviathan broke my arm.”

He only groaned unintelligbly in response.

I ran over to the general area where Leviathan had dropped Armsmaster’s arm.   I tripped over the crack that ran down the middle of the street, got my feet under me to keep running, and began feeling through the water.

I came within inches of touching the submerged blade, turning my hand to molecular dust.

Finding the arm, I picked it up.  Heavy, almost too much to hold in one hand.  It wasn’t just the weight of the armor or the fact that it was a muscular, full-grown-man’s limb – the gauntlet had been crushed around the pole of the Halberd, crumpled like tinfoil.  With the arm and weapon in a bricklayer’s grip that was painful to maintain, I hurried back to Armsmaster’s side, dropped them near him.  I shook him, hoping to get him alert, to no avail.

With my only working hand, I pried the Halberd free of his glove, rested his arm across his chest, and pressed the button.

“Armsmaster down!  CC-7!  Leviathan is heading West…”

I felt the bugs I’d clustered in Leviathan’s wounds change direction.  The compass point between West and Northwest was what?  More Wests than North.

“Cancel that!  He’s going West-North-West from my location!”

My voice echoed back to me in the Armband’s tinny voice a half-second after I’d finished.  Armsmaster’s armband changed to display a red dot, tracking Leviathan’s movements, or the closest approximation the system could guess.

“Roger, sounds like he might be heading for one of the shelters, lots of people packed into a space where they can’t run, vulnerable,” someone replied, “Medical help incoming.  Whoever this is, you can track Leviathan?”

“Yes, as long as I’m within a few blocks of him.”  Again, the system relayed my message. Affirmative.  Range restriction of ‘a few blocks’.

Did it really need to reword what I said?

“Can you fly?  Chase him?”

“No.”  Negative.

“Then I’m sending a flier your way, to ensure you stay close enough.  We need eyes on this bastard, and you’re them.”

“Got it!”

There was only silence after that.  Teeth clenched, shivering, I pressed my good hand as hard as I could manage against the ragged mess of Armsmaster’s shoulder, trying to slow the blood loss.

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Hive 5.9

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“Yeah, me,” I answered Lung, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt.

“Some history?” Sundancer murmured.

“I made his crotch rot off.”

She turned to stare at me.

“Accidentally.”

“How do you-” she started, then she stopped as Lung’s growl rose in volume enough to turn her head.

Angelica and Judas advanced steadily until they were on either side of me.

“Step down, Undersider,” Kaiser spoke from the opposite end of the room, “My girls and I have this in hand.”

“Do you?” I challenged him, not breaking eye contact with Lung, “Because Lung looks like he’s in pretty good shape there.  You know how this works, right?  He only gets stronger the longer you fight him.  If you haven’t finished him off by now, you’re probably not going to.”

Lung chuckled, low and gravelly.  He craned his neck to look at Kaiser, and I shivered.  His neck alone was nearly as long as my torso and thicker at the base, tapering down to a more or less normal sized head.  What was creepier was that he’d bent his neck in a ‘u’ shape to look behind himself.  It was a movement that a gymnast would have been hard pressed to perform with their back.  It wouldn’t be long before he just wasn’t recognizable as something who had once been human.

The six of his thugs that were gathered around him looked like they were almost as scared of him as they were of us.

“What would you propose, then?” Kaiser asked me.

“Sundancer and I will help out,” I told him.  I glanced at Sundancer, and she nodded.

Lung laughed again.  “Ooo?  Ug gurr?”

Before I could figure out what he’d just said to me, he lunged straight at me, passing between two of his people, moving on all fours.

I’d sent the flying insects and wasps into the room to help Bitch search for supplies, and I directed them straight for Lung as soon as I realized what he was doing.  Too little, too late.

Then Judas intercepted him.  The pair of them rolled and tumbled, and I couldn’t tell which of them was making which snarling or growling noise.

When the momentum of Judas’ pounce had stopped carrying them across the floor, Lung managed to get his footing first, and physically heaved Judas across the main floor of the warehouse.  Judas slammed into two sets of the long tables, sending clouds of white powder billowing around him.

When Angelica made her move, Lung was ready for her.  He caught hold of her snout and foreclaw before she could do any damage and leveraged her forward momentum to throw her too, straight at Judas.  There was an almost judo or akido kind of style to the throw, except I doubted either of them were human enough for normal moves and techniques to apply.  What was more likely, I thought, that his reflexes, flexibility and strength were on a level where that sort of thing came naturally to him.

In any case, my bodyguards, if you could call them that, had been tossed aside away like they were stuffed animals.  Lung didn’t drop to all fours again as he advanced toward me.  Instead, he flexed his right hand, and my eyes were drawn to the foot-long blades that tipped each finger.

“Sundancer?” I asked, quiet, “Help me out?”

“If I used my power, I’d probably hurt you worse than I hurt him.”

“That line is getting old fast.”

Lung lunged again, and I threw myself to one side, too slow, too short a distance.

With the sound of swords being drawn out of their sheaths, a barrier of blades and spears rose up from the ground between Lung and I.  I found traction on the asphalt with my hands and feet, and I managed to half-crawl, half run away from him.

Lung started to move around the barrier of blades, only to be blocked by another bristling growth.  He roared, then leapt for the rafters up at the ceiling.  I knew what he was doing almost right away, and ran for cover – once he had a grip up there, it would be a matter of using his grip on the steel girders that lined the ceiling to jump straight at me.  I wasn’t two paces before I knew there was no cover I could get to fast enough.

Except he didn’t get that far.  A square pillar of steel  as tall and long as an eighteen wheeler speared downward from the roof, straight at him.  It caught Lung in his midsection and shoved him down into the ground, hard.  A few seconds later, the weight of the block of steel tore it from the section of ceiling it was rooted in.  It didn’t hit anyone as it dropped down but I could guess it would’ve killed someone: I could feel the impact of it striking the ground in my bones.

I looked at Kaiser.  He was standing where he’d been when he walked into the room, hands clasped behind his back.

“Fenja, Menja,” Kaiser’s order wasn’t shouted, but it could be heard across the warehouse.  If you could call it an order.

But the two eighteen-foot tall valkyries seemed to know what he wanted.  They advanced towards Lung with their weapons drawn, and Lung’s people began backing slowly away.  I felt a pang of sympathy for Lung’s rank and file, mainly for the ones who’d been coerced into this.  They’d probably seen what Fenja and Menja were capable of, earlier, but they couldn’t run without risking their boss’ wrath.  Caught between a rock and a hard place.

Lung wasn’t quite down and out yet, though.  He started climbing to his feet, only to have a pyramid of criss-crossing blades spear up around him.  Blades appeared under and over his arms, just beneath his armpit, behind his knee, by his groin, with dozens more rising above and around him. Before he could find his way out, he was trapped.  Buried and hidden beneath the layers of steel.

Kaiser inclined his chin, looking toward the ceiling, and I saw a shimmer.  The tip of a blade began to emerge from one of the iron girders above, revealing itself at a glacial pace.  It was no more than a half foot thick, but nearly twenty feet wide.  I wasn’t sure if it was an optical illusion from the rippling energies of Kaiser’s power or not, but I thought maybe the ceiling was sagging under the weight of it.  If he wasn’t careful, he’d bring the roof down on our heads.

Then Kaiser lowered his head to face the area where Lung was trapped and the massive sword he’d manifested in the ceiling plunged down into the pyramid in a heartbeat.  Sparks showered as the gargantuan blade sheared through the trap.

But there was more hot metal that wasn’t a result of the impact.  When I looked again, I saw Lung had avoided the blade.  The side of the pyramid closest to me glowed a white-orange, the blades curling and sagging in the intensity of the heat.  He’d softened the metal enough with his pyrokinesis that he could use his monstrous strength and push his way free.  Enough, at least, to avoid being divided in two.

Lung roared as he climbed free.  As Kaiser raised more blades around him, Lung swung his claws and shattered the metal, sending the pieces sliding across the floor.

“Aiiihurrr,” Lung growled.

“You’re an animal, Lung,” Kaiser answered him, “Even without your power making you into… this.  Go down!”  As if to punctuate his statement, a spear of solid steel erupted from the wall and slammed into Lung, carrying him to the end of the room opposite where Judas and Angelica were.  Lung managed to grip the spear and move himself so the spearpoint wasn’t pressed against his chest when it punctured the concrete of the wall.

“Your people… animals.”  Kaiser intoned.

Not six paces away from me, one of Lung’s thugs let out a raw scream and collapsed to the ground.  Dagger-like blades had pierced the tops of his feet mid-stride.  As he used his hands to break his fall, another set of blades punched through his palms.  The screams of the other thugs echoed his.  He was on his hands and knees, unable to move with his hands and feet effectively nailed to the ground.

“Kaiser!” I shouted, “No!”

“Not your business, little girl,” Kaiser told me, turning in my direction.

I took an immediate step back, fearing blades would appear under my feet.

“This is wrong,” I said, as I watched a sliver of steel sprout out of the ground and rise with a controlled speed to the base of the thug’s throat.  He was forced to arch his back and raise his head to the absolute limits to avoid getting a very unnecessary tracheotomy.  I glanced at Lung.  He was watching what was happening, but I couldn’t read his alien expression.

“Wrong?” Kaiser chuckled, “As far as I’m concerned, the moment you need to fall back on morals to argue something, you’ve already lost the argument.  This is war.”

Lung moved for Kaiser, this time.  He virtually rolled to one side to avoid an outcropping of spearpoints angled in a way that he might have run himself through on them, then resumed his charge.

One of the giantess twins stepped in, kicking Lung into and almost through a wall.  Lung bounced back almost immediately, drawing on his pyrokinesis to direct a column of blue-yellow flame at her.  The other twin intercepted the fire with her shield.

A few seconds later, she was stumbling back and away from Lung and throw her shield away to avoid having the heated metal burn her arm.

Kaiser’s team wasn’t going to win this on their own.  As much as I despised stepping in and helping him…

“Sundancer, now would be a great time to use your power.”  I spoke.  As I said the words, I called on every bug that was in the area and sent them to Lung.

“It’s not- no.  I’ll burn them.”

“Then burn them!  If you don’t use your power, I can pretty much guarantee Lung will burn them worse.”

“Doubt it,” Sundancer replied.  But she raised her hands in front of her, and there was a brilliant flare of light, only a fraction of a second, but enough to leave a black-blue spot in the center of my vision.  There was a brief roaring sound as the light faded.

I turned my focus to my bugs as another flicker of light appeared, longer and stronger than the first, again, accompanied by that faint roar.

“Hey, Skitter, was it?” Sundancer spoke.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Get back.  Way back.”

I ran for it, pulling my mask up and bringing my fingers to my mouth in the best whistle I could manage.

Two seconds later, Angelica shoved her snout between my legs.  Had it been a movie, or if I’d been Bitch, maybe, I would’ve been able to slide or jump back and land on her neck or shoulders, ride on from there.  As it was, I half-fell, half-rolled over the top of her head and only barely managed to get a grip on a spike on her shoulder.  I clung to that as she ran, praying I wouldn’t fall and get trampled.

“Angelica, stop, stay!” I called out, hoping she knew the command, that she’d listen.  She did, slowing her pace to a walk, then stopping just by the loading bay door we’d come in.  Judas caught up and walked around her, until he was just in front of us.  He was still covered in the white dust, but it didn’t seem to be having any real effect on him.  I hopped down from Angelica’s side, ready to climb on her and jostle her into action if Lung made another attempt to come after me.  I wasn’t sure I could steer her, but with the prospect of Lung chasing me, I’d rather be moving totally uncontrolled at Angelica’s speed than anything my own two feet could offer.

Sundancer had managed to get her power going.  A ball of light, larger than a basketball, smaller than a beachball, sat between her hands.

Light?  That was it?

Then I saw the floor.

The warehouse had clearly been raised above a flat expanse of asphalt, maybe an old parking lot, and the surface had cracked and been patched a fair bit over the years.  It still bore the oil stains from the old days.

Directly below Sundancer, the floor was normal.  Starting around five feet from her, though, the ground looked wet, glassy.

The asphalt was melting.

She dropped her hands, and the ball of light rose.  Like it had a mind of its own, it darted towards Lung, zipping left and right and up and down as it moved.  I saw how it rose higher as it moved over Lung’s people, who were still nailed to the floor.  At one point, it moved only ten or so feet over one of the tables, and the plastic surface of the table seemed to crumple up in fast motion, turning black and smouldering with tongues of flame.

I scattered my swarm, all too aware they weren’t doing a thing to Lung, knowing they’d just die when Sundancer got her orb to Lung.

She didn’t make it touch him, but seeing what it had done to the table, I thought maybe that was a good thing.  Lung raised a hand towards the light and I could see the heat shimmers in the air.  She pushed it a little closer to him, and his legs buckled.

Kaiser was apparently unwilling to let Sundancer steal the show, because he brought a shaft of metal out of the wall behind Lung, shoving Lung toward the orb.  Sundancer moved the ball back, but just the second or so of close proximity to the ball was enough to take the fight out of Lung.  He fell to all fours, tried to move, and found the asphalt like a molten tar beneath him.

Wasn’t he supposed to be fireproof?  Or was that immunity only to the flames he made with his own power?  Or, I thought, was that ball of light -Sundancer’s miniature sun- that hot?

I was lingering at the exit, watching and waiting to see the outcome.  My bugs were prepared and ready, lingering as close as they could get without being wiped out by the superheated air.

Even with his superhuman constitution, even with his pyrokinesis to maybe take the edge off the effect, Lung was clearly suffering.  Just a matter of time, I realized, before he collapsed.  Probably, I supposed, much longer than one would think, with his regeneration.

Then the light of Sundancer’s orb winked out.

It took me a few long moments of blinking the spots out of my eyes before I could make out the scene in its entirety.

Lung was limp, his arms dangling at his sides.  He was still bent over, and he might have fallen face first into the tar, if it wasn’t for the spear of iron that was impaling him through the heart.

“What did you do!?” Sundancer shouted.

“Obviously,” Kaiser said, “I ended it.”

“It was already over!”

I was under the impression very few people really argued with Kaiser.  Fenja and Menja joined him, one on either side of him, and neither of them were sheathing their weapons or shrinking back to a normal size.  I took that to be a very bad sign.

I was so preoccupied with watching Kaiser that I almost missed what happened next.

It started as a flash of crimson in the corner of my eye.  I looked, and I saw Lung’s wings fully unfurled.  Like the wings of a bat, only they had silvery scales where the bat had fur, and the flesh that stretched between the ‘fingers’ of the wings was the deep, dark red of blood.

Lung grabbed the spear that impaled his chest and snapped it with his claws.  He stood, and his entire midsection seemed to arrange so he stood another foot or two taller.  Taking hold of the fragment that was still embedded in his chest, he slowly slid it out.  Once it free, he cast it aside.  It clattered to the floor of the warehouse.

We were so quiet, you could hear the ringing of the steel as it settled on the ground.

“Sundancer!  Run!” I shouted, breaking the stillness.  I sent my bugs swarming to Lung.  Anything to block his vision, distract him for even a second.

The events that followed seemed to happen in slow motion.  Lung repeated what he’d been trying to do as the fight opened, only nothing seemed capable of getting in his way, now.  He was faster, stronger, more maneuverable.

He lunged toward Kaiser, using his wings to carry him effortlessly above a growth of steel blades.  Reaching Kaiser, he slammed the man into the wall.  Kaiser went limp, but Lung repeated the process, banging him against the brick of the warehouse wall a half dozen times in the span of seconds.  When he was done, he flung Kaiser away like a toy.

Fenja had to drop her spear to catch Kaiser in her arms, which seemed to be exactly what Lung wanted.  Lung did the same ‘I explode’ trick he’d done to wipe out my bugs in my first encounter with him, only it was ten times the explosion, ten times as big.  The two giantesses staggered back, which gave Lung the opportunity to dart across the floor and drive his flattened, clawed hand into Menja’s belly like a knife.

As he withdrew his claw, she collapsed.

“Nessa!” Fenja screamed.

Lung ignored her and started walking towards Sundancer and I.  Fenja rushed to her sister’s side, still carrying Kaiser.

Sundancer began forming her miniature sun once more, with increasingly frequent flickers of light and fire gathering between her hands.

“No.” Lung boomed.  He raised his bloody claw, and the flame in Sundancer’s hands dissipated, slipping out of her grasp like greased eels.

She tried once more, and again, he thwarted her with an almost casual ease.

Before she could make a third attempt, Lung blasted her with a torrent of roaring flame.  For two, three, four seconds, the fire washed over her, consumed her.

When he stopped, there were tongues of flame dancing on the asphalt around her, even her costume had fire lingering on it, but both she and her costume were untouched.

She, at least, was fireproof.  Or she’d had to be, to avoid being burned by her own power.

She wasn’t, however, invincible.  As the flames of his attack dissipated, Lung was made visible again, revealed to be standing right in front of her.  He barely seemed to care she was there as he backhanded her aside.

Then he turned his attention to me.

Just me left, really.  I swallowed hard, drew my very underwhelming knife and stood straight, facing Lung.  Please don’t burn me, please, please.  Look at this knife and see it as an insult.  An excuse to trounce me physically.

Angelica started snarling at Lung.  She took a step toward him.

“No!” I ordered her, “Back!”

The snarls ceased, and she looked at me.

“Back,” I repeated.  When I took a step toward Lung, she didn’t follow.  A powder-covered Judas stood fifteen feet away, tense, but not approaching either.  Good.  No use in anyone else getting hurt.  There was nothing else she could do.

Hell, I was almost positive there was nothing else I could do.

My bugs gathered on Lung, but as far as I could tell, there was no skin, anymore.  No flesh to bite, nothing to sting.

Lung rumbled with a rough, guttural chuckle, and let a brief flame wash over him, wiping the swarm out of existence.

I dispersed the bugs in his vicinity that hadn’t yet had a chance to touch him and get burned for their trouble.  No point.  Detrimental, almost.

Then Bitch, riding Brutus, bounded down from the hole in the ceiling and crashed into Lung.

“Bitch!” I shouted, too late, “No!”

Once he got over the shock of the initial impact, Lung used one hand to grab Bitch from where she sat on Brutus’ back, and took hold of Brutus by the neck with his other.  Heaving his arm, and Brutus, to his left side, then to his right, Lung casting the dog head over heels through the air.

Judas and Angelica began to move forward, but stopped when Lung elicited a scream of pain from Bitch.

“Nnno,” Lung rumbled.

“Stop!” I shouted, stepping forward again, “I’m the one you want, aren’t I?”

It always sounded so good when you heard it in the movies.  As I realized what I’d just said, it only sounded stupid.

He advanced toward me, carrying Bitch like a careless seven year old might carry a cat.  I backed away, but his stride was long enough for him to close the gap effortlessly.  He grabbed me and hefted me into the air, lifting me above his head so he could look up at me.

“Ug hurrrrr.”

He couldn’t talk, so I couldn’t even fall back on the tired old cliche of getting him to monologue.  Fuck.

He had my neck encircled with thumb and forefinger, two claws at my ribcage and his ‘pinky’ finger at my midsection, just below my waist.  He squeezed a fraction tighter, and I groaned.  The fabric of my costume was preventing the edges of his claws from cutting into me, but it wasn’t reinforced to stop me from being crushed.

I directed a bug into his eye.  It stayed there, wings fluttering in staccato.  It was annoying enough for him to drop Bitch and deal with it.  He didn’t give her a chance to escape, though.  Before he dealt with the bug, he shoved her against the ground and stepped on her, holding her down with his clawed foot.  That done, he used the points of his claw to pick the bug from his eye socket.

He chuckled again, low, gravelly, as he examined the cockroach impaled on his clawtip.  “Auuhh-roagh?”  Cockroach?

He lowered his arm so I was at his eye level.  Then he squeezed again, weaker than the first time.  Shook me, not as hard as he could have.

Then his arm sagged again, until my toes were brushing the ground.  After shaking me, his grip had loosened, and he hadn’t really tightened it, so I managed to get my knee against the base of his palm and shove myself backward, push myself free.  My feet touched asphalt, and I backed up a few steps.

“Hurrrrrrrr,” he rumbled.

“Don’t fucking underestimate me,” I snarled in response.

I don’t know if he heard me.  I hadn’t even finished the sentence before I had to skip backward two steps to avoid being crushed beneath him as he collapsed face first to the asphalt.

“Bitch, you okay?” I asked.

She was picking herself off the ground.  She nodded.

“What happened?” she asked.

I sheathed my knife and reached for my cell phone with one hand.  My other hand, I extended with the palm up.  A cockroach settled on it.

“Wasn’t sure it would work, or if it’d be enough.  Took a bit of caterpillar, had a roach swab it in that pool of blood Newter left upstairs, and mashed the thing in Lung’s eye.  Big and tough as he is, a drug that strong in the mucus membranes of the eye?  So close to the brain?  Apparently it’s enough.”

Bitch folded her arms, looking down at Lung.  Then she looked up at me.

“Now what?”

It was a surprisingly apt question, coming from her.  Did we just leave him here?  He’d be all better in a matter of minutes.  There were options.  I just didn’t like any of them.

I dialed Tattletale’s phone, but it was Regent who answered.

“Hey,” he said.

“A, lemon,” I said.

“C, grass,” he replied, “You wouldn’t believe it.  We found one of Bakuda’s workshops.  The stuff she has here is crazy.”

“No time to chat.  I need to talk to Tattletale, fast.”

“She’s checking the place for booby traps.  Distractions probably aren’t a good idea.”

“It’s kind of important,” I said, looking down at Lung.

“Right.”

Two seconds later, Tattletale’s voice was on the other end, “Hey?”

“Quick question.  I have to be sure, which is why I’m calling you.  Lung heals, right?”

“Yeah.  Wait… Lung’s there?”

“Unconscious at my feet.  But I don’t know how long, so answer fast.  He heals?  He’s already healing what I did to him from last time, right?”

“Right.  He’ll heal pretty much anything, given time, provided he isn’t dead.  Lose an arm, he’d grow it back in a few months.”

“Thanks.  That’s what I needed to know,”  I said.  “Good luck with the booby traps.”  I hung up.

Then I looked down at Lung.  I drew my knife.

“Why the knife?” Bitch asked.  I think anyone else might have sounded concerned.  She just sounded curious.

“I’m ending this.”

I grabbed one of the larger spikes that framed Lung’s face and heaved it to one side so his accordion-like neck was outstretched, face upturned.

No time to be delicate about it.  I had no idea how strong the toxins in Newter’s blood were, or how fast Lung’s biology would process it.

I jammed the knife into Lung’s eye socket.  His head and consequently his eyes weren’t as large as you’d think, in proportion to the rest of his frame, but the tissue around it was tough.  I had to leverage the knife back and forth before I was able to pry his eyeball out.  It was hot to the touch as I held it in the palm of my hand, no bigger than a ping-pong ball.

The second eye was faster, though no less messy.

When I was done, I stood, sheathed my knife and backed away from Lung’s body. Shouldn’t I feel worse about this?  Shouldn’t I feel sick, or grossed out, or disturbed by the morality of it?  I didn’t even feel cold, the way Grue had described.  It just felt like something I had to do.

I glanced at the two eyeballs clasped in my hand, then put them out of my mind.  I surveyed the room.  Priorities?

I asked Bitch first, “The dogs are okay?”  If I placed them second to anyone else but her, or if I forgot to ask, I got the feeling Bitch would mind.

“They’ll heal when they turn back to normal.”

“Sundancer?” I asked.

Sundancer was lying on her side, one arm pressed against the shoulder Oni Lee had stabbed.  “I’m… okay.”

That was everyone I gave a damn about, leaving only Fenja, Menja and Kaiser.  I looked across the room and called out, “Fenja?”

The giantess nodded.

“Get your sister to a hospital, or whichever doctor your guys use.  Get your boss taken care of.”

She stood without giving me a response.  Her sister had shrunk enough for her to cradle in her arms.  Kaiser, for his part, was slung over her shoulder, limp.

“Oh, Fenja?”

She paused.

“I’ll leave it to you to make the call, but if you think Kaiser has a sense of honor, maybe point out it would be bad form to push the point on the dogfighting thing, after we dealt with Lung for him, saved his life.”

She nodded, then ducked through the opening in the wall.

I stepped toward Sundancer and offered a hand to help her up.  She flinched away.

Oh.  My hands were bloody.  I dropped the offered hand to my side.

“Let’s go,” I suggested.

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Hive 5.8

Last Chapter                                                                                                Next Chapter

I didn’t like leaving Labyrinth behind, after seeing her help turn the tide of our fight against Oni Lee, but I couldn’t use someone that couldn’t communicate with me.

Bitch, Sundancer and I all sat astride Brutus as he headed towards the warehouse once again.  My bugs lagged behind us.

“We should be fighting Lung,” Bitch growled, “Not helping the freak.”

“What?” Sundancer asked, “Why wouldn’t we help him?”

“His fault if he got hurt,” Bitch snarled.

“And if you got hurt?” Sundancer challenged her, “You’d want us to leave you?”

“Fuck no.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if you did.”

“We’re helping him,” I stated, firm.

“Yeah?  I’m the one telling this big lug where to go.”  She slapped her hand on the side of Brutus’ neck a few times.

I would have yelled at her, should have, maybe.  Instead, I just leaned forward until I was pressing against her back, and spoke into her ear, “We let him die, you think Faultline’s going to let it slide?  She might hurt or kill Tattletale or Regent in retaliation.”

My piece said, I leaned back and waited to see how she’d respond.  If that wasn’t enough to convince her, and I had no idea if it would be, I was ready to try jumping off Brutus’ back and seeing what I could do to help Newter on my own.

Bitch didn’t reply.  She didn’t take us around, over or through the building, either, though.  When we stopped, it was by the stairwell leading up to where Newter had fallen.

The business they had been into wasn’t prostitution or slave trading.  Long tables were arranged around the ground floor of the warehouse, with stools lined up beside them.  On those tables were shallow boxes with blocks and piles of a white powder.  Various tools – rulers, funnels, scales, measuring cups and no-name brand boxes of sealable plastic bags were arranged around each station.  Heroin?  Cocaine?  I didn’t know my drugs well enough to guess.  The center of the room had been left more or less clear, maybe so cars or trucks could pull in.

So the ’employees’ had been wearing little to no clothing, presumably, to keep the clothes clean of the white dust.  Or maybe to keep them from pocketing any drugs for themselves.

The building rumbled with an impact, and I was reminded of the business at hand.  Was I more distracted than usual, right now?  Was it the concussion?

Bitch had been right, before – the stairwell and what I could see of the the second floor was too low for both a dog and a rider.  I hopped off Brutus’ back, stumbling a bit as I landed, then headed up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

Newter was lying in a puddle of blood, in the midst of a bunch of thugs, who were all lying down, crawling or writhing, oblivious to my existence.

Seeing the thugs was enough to remind me of how dangerous it would be to touch Newter.  I was wearing gloves and leggings with padded soles, but would that be enough?  The dragline silk I’d used for my costume was mostly waterproof, but the weave itself was porous, and I was worried enough that touching his blood could mean a terminal overdose that I couldn’t risk it.

My approach stopped short of the puddle.  Newter had a knife wound just below his shoulderblade that traced around his side, as long as my forearm and deep enough that I couldn’t tell how bad the damage was.  He was breathing, but his breaths were shallow enough that I almost couldn’t tell.  I was here, I could bend down to touch him, but I was helpless to do anything.  Moments after I made contact with his skin, even with my gloves on, and I’d probably be on some hallucinogenic drug trip, flopping around like a fish on dry land.

Bitch and Sundancer approached from behind me, stopping at my side.

“Bitch, go downstairs, check the supplies they were using with the drugs.  Look for rubber gloves, saran wrap, anything like that.  If you can’t find anything, look in the bathroom, under the sinks.  I doubt there’ll be a first aid kit, but if you can find one, bring it.”

Bitch didn’t answer, but she headed down the stairs.  Just to be safe, as my bugs reached the building, I swept the flying ones through the rooms to help me look for first aid supplies and to keep an eye on Bitch and the rest of the building.

“What are we doing?” Sundancer asked.

“You’re staying with him.  See if you can get a response, talk to him.  I’m checking in there.”  I pointed to the office at the end of the hall.  Just in front of the door there was a gaping hole in the wall and a pile of debris – the mess Judas had made when he’d lunged through the side of the building to corner Oni Lee.

I had a dim recollection of what my bugs had sensed when they’d first entered the building and checked out the room.  I’d been more focused on the people and potential booby traps, but I remembered that it had been an office, with a desk and a curtained off area with a bed.  Maybe the bed was there so the guys in charge could take turns sleeping there, ensuring there was always someone to keep an eye on things.  Maybe it was for the half-dressed ’employees’, for taking advantage of them or so there was a place to put the ones that accidentally overdosed while working.

Entering the office, I confirmed my suspicions about the existence of the bed.  I began stripping the badly stained sheets off.

Was it odd that this place freaked me out ten times as much as nearly getting offed by Oni Lee?  Drugs had always spooked the hell out of me.  One of the first times I’d ever ridden a bus, when I was around five or six, I’d seen a methhead freak out, making enough of a ruckus that the driver had to stop and force him off.  I’d never really gotten over that first impression, where just the idea of being around someone that was high made me sort of anxious.

It wasn’t just that, either.  In grade school and junior high, I’d had classmates drop off the face of the planet, hearing only rumors and hints from other classmates or my teachers that there were drugs involved.  Either my classmates themselves getting caught up in things, or parents or siblings dragging the kid into their mess to the point that the kid couldn’t come to school.  One as bad as the other.  Almost from the beginning, I’d had this sense of drugs as this unstoppable black hole of fucked-up-ness that swallowed in anyone close to the addict.

Yet people did it.  It was something common and profitable enough that in an area like Brockton Bay where there were as many people unemployed as not, the ABB needed a money counting machine in this very office.  Profitable enough that they had an open safe with stacks of bills inside.

My bugs weren’t doing much, so I set them the task of collecting the money.  Within a second or two of my having the thought, the mass of roaches, centipedes, pillbugs and ants flowed into the piles of money and began pushing it all off the desk or into paper bags.  Houseflies and wasps gathered on the bills that tried to fly through the air and retrieved them.  It wasn’t perfect, it was a little clumsy, but it still caught me off guard just how well they were able to coordinate for something like that, without any conscious direction on my part.

I couldn’t let myself get distracted.  I could put my bugs on autopilot and have them finish the job while I focused on more important things.  Pulling off the bedsheets, I uncovered a plastic sheet.  The kind you used when your kids wet the bed.  Doped out drug addicts, too, maybe.  The top of the plastic sheet looked kinda grody, but I wasn’t in a position to be picky.  I pulled it off the mattress, balled it up in my hands and hurried back into the hall.

“Help me,” I ordered Sundancer.  With her help, I laid out the plastic sheet, bottom side up, at Newter’s feet.  By the time we had it flat and ready, Bitch was returning.

“Found two pairs of plastic gloves and some rubber gloves under a sink,” she said, “First aid kit, too, but it feels light.”

“Open it,” I said, taking a pair of plastic gloves.  It was awkward, fitting them over my normal gloves, but I managed it.  Sundancer just pulled off her costume gloves and put on the plastic ones.  She was caucasian, I noted, pale.  “Tell me what’s inside, fast.”

“Got some tape, bandages, thermometer, safety pins, rubbing alcohol, soap…”

“Needle, thread?” I asked.

“No.”

“Gauze pads?  Big bandages?”

“No.”

With our plastic gloves on, Sundancer and I managed to haul Newter onto the plastic sheet.  The moment she let go, Sundancer winced and reached up to her shoulder, but she stopped short of actually touching it.

I turned to my teammate, “Bitch, go downstairs.  Those people who were in here took their clothes off and my bugs say they stashed the clothes in a room below us.  Find me some purses, as many as you can grab, as fast as you can grab them.”

She didn’t move, this time.  She just glared at me.

“Fucking move!” I shouted at her.  She gave me the evil eye before she left again.

“Bandages are going to be too small,” Sundancer said, as I tried to wrestle Newter’s blood-slick tail onto the plastic sheet.

“Douse them in the alcohol, use them to clean the injury of blood.  Use the dry bandages to pat it dry so the tape can stick.  Don’t be afraid to get into the wound, just be gentle.”

She nodded, and began working on it.  I grabbed the tape and began fumbling with it.  Two pairs of gloves on, and I couldn’t lift off the end of it.  I grabbed my knife and used the edge it to get the job done.  Once I had the tape, I began holding the wound closed and taping crosswise across it.

I could only hope I was doing the right things, here.  A month of weekend first aid classes had not prepared me for this.

Bitch arrived with purses and practically threw them at me.  I could have gotten pissed, but Newter couldn’t afford for me to.  I began emptying the purses onto the ground beside me and sorting through the contents.  Pens, wallets, headphones, books, tampons, pictures, receipts, more receipts, change, keys, yet more receipts…

“What are you looking for?” Sundancer asked.

The third purse turned up what I needed.  Sanitary pads.  I tore one open and pressed it to the wound, then began taping it down.  Unasked for, Sundancer grabbed another and opened it so it would be ready for me.

“Sterile, absorbent, covers more area than the bandage can,” I got around to answering her question.  “If he lives, his teammates might give him a hard time, but it’s better than nothing.”

“You didn’t tape it down all the way,” Sundancer pointed out.

“Only three sides,” I agreed, “So it can breathe.”  I only vaguely recalled some instruction on that front.  I was hoping it was right.

If I failed here, what right did I have to call myself an aspiring hero?

When the wound was bandaged as much as I could manage, the three of us bundled him up in the sheet and lifted him.  Bitch and Sundancer had an injured arm and shoulder, respectively, so they both took his head and shoulders while I took his feet  With agonizing slowness, we carried him down the stairs.  then as carefully as we could manage with a body weighing half again as much as any of us, we draped him across Brutus’ shoulders.

A bone-jarring crash nearly undid all of our hard work.  Brutus nearly lost his footing at the impact, and I know I would’ve fallen if I hadn’t already been holding onto him.

A gauntleted hand as wide across as my armspan had crashed through the wall.  The whole building shuddered as another hand punched through the brick of the wall twenty feet from the first hole.  Fingers gripped the building, and pulled the entire section of wall out in one piece.

“Go!” I shouted at Bitch, “Take him to the others!  Call Tattetale, get the number for that cape doctor, get medical attention for anyone who needs it!”

She hesitated, opened her mouth to protest.

I raised my voice, “Do not fuck with me here!”

There was a rumble outside as the removed section of wall was thrown against the ground outside, hard.

Just an instant later, a half dozen ABB members retreated into the warehouse through the hole, taking cover from the giantesses.  They saw us and stopped short, wary, weapons ready but not raised or pointed at us.

Lung followed his thugs into the room.  He was bigger than I’d seen him yet at nearly fifteen feet in height, and was covered in layers of scales that left him barely recognizable as human.  Spearlike growths stuck out of his shoulders in what I realized were the beginnings of wings.  His mask had been torn off at some point, and the features of his face had been warped by his transformation.  The shape of his skull and face were more catlike than human, and his nose and mouth were a single X-shaped opening, bristling with pointed teeth that stuck in every direction.

I could see why he usually wore the mask.

“Bitch,” I murmured, “If you don’t leave now, I don’t think you’re going to get another chance.”

“But-”

“Which do you want more?  To fight, here and now, or to make sure Faultline and the other groups don’t have an excuse to do anything to our teammates?”

I saw her hesitate.  The fact that she even had to think about it… I could have slapped her.

Kaiser strolled in, unworried, unhurried.  Lung moved like he was going to lunge for him, then stopped just in time to avoid impaling himself on the narrow blade of steel that had erupted from the ground, pointed at his heart.  I wasn’t sure if it would have penetrated his covering of scales, but if I were Lung, I don’t think I would have gambled on it either.

Fenja and Menja reduced their size to fit through the hole they’d made in the wall, then grew again as they had the headroom.  They settled at a height of eighteen or twenty feet.  Fenja carried a sword and round shield, while Menja had a spear.  Or the other way around, whatever.

In the corner of my eye, I saw Bitch hop onto Brutus, then ride in the direction of the sniper team and Labyrinth, a wrapped-up Newter lying limp in front of her.  Judas and Angelica remained behind, not far from Sundancer and I.  Their entire bodies were taut with tension, their heads low, as they glared at the new arrivals.

Lung turned to survey the room.  His men were arranged in a loose circle around him, facing us.  His eyes settled on me.

“Ooo,” he rumbled, his words were distorted by the shape of his altered mouth, but it was easy enough to guess what he’d just said.  You.

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Hive 5.6

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However effective Bitch’s power play might have been, it didn’t do much to help the tension between the factions making up our group.  It hadn’t been just Kaiser that got spooked and sprayed with blood.  Worst case scenario, if a fight broke out in the group, I was worried that hard feelings from that one thing could set others against us.

I decided to try to remedy that.  The Travelers seemed to be the only group present where there wasn’t some drama already mucking the waters.

“Hey,” I slowed my pace so I could talk to the girl from the Travelers, “What’s your name?”

“My codename?”

“Yeah.”

“Sundancer.”

“I’m going by Skitter.  Couldn’t decide on a name so the media sort of picked one for me.”

“You’re one of the Outsiders, right?”

“Undersiders.  I’m new to the team, honestly, but they’re alright.”

“Uh huh.”  She looked in Bitch’s direction.

“Not as bad as you’d think,” I said, smiling.  She couldn’t see me smile, with my mask covering my mouth, but I did hope she could hear the humor in my tone.  “How’s life among the Travelers?”

She seemed caught off guard at the question.  It took her a few seconds to decide how to respond.  “Intense.  Violent.  Lonely.”

The answer surprised me.  She chose the word intense rather than exciting, but that wasn’t the strangest part of her answer.  “Lonely?  I wouldn’t think that was the case, spending time with teammates.”

She shrugged, “There’s stuff going on that makes hanging out less fun than it should be.  I’m not going to explain it, so don’t ask.”

I raised my hands, palms up, stopping her, “Wasn’t going to.  I was just curious what it’s like for other teams, since I’m fairly new to this.”

She relaxed a bit at that.  “It’s not just the… I can’t think of a word better than drama… but drama sounds like such an understatement.  Whatever.  It’s not the other stuff that’s going on, it’s that we’re constantly moving, rarely spending more than a week in one place, you know?”

“I don’t,” I admitted.  I fudged the truth a little, just to be safe, “I moved twice as a kid, but I was too young to remember it.  For the most part, I grew up here.”

“It gets old, having to-” she stopped talking as I was suddenly pushed to one side.  The tip of Newter’s tail pressed against the center of my chest and moved me back, pushed me against the hood of a dilapidated old car.

“Hey,” I grunted, but he shook his head, pressed a finger to his lip.  His blue eyes bored into mine.  They were weird eyes.  No whites, just azure blue irises that extended from corner to corner, with rectangular, horizontal pupils.

I looked at the others, and they were all moving into cover.  Kaiser, Fenja and Menja had all ducked into an alleyway.  Bitch and her dogs were disappearing around the far corner of the same building, making only the scratching noise of claws against concrete.

Ahead of us, a trio of people in ABB colors crossed the street.  A guy and a girl who looked like they might have been gang members before Bakuda’s hardcore recruitment drive were talking.  A teen who was about my age trailed behind them, looking too scared and worn out to be anything but one of the new recruits.  They were all armed.  A machete dangled from the male thug’s hand, while the girl was toying with a handgun.  The scared looking kid had a baseball bat with nails hammered into it.  People really did that?  The nail-studded baseball bat?

Just behind them was the building that had to be our target.  It was a warehouse, dirty gray, with the letters ‘ABB’ spray painted on and around the loading bay door in red and green in an elaborate style.

When the patrol was gone, Newter spoke, “They’ve got patrols, and they’ve tagged the building.  That’ll be our target, today.”  He checked his watch, “Two minutes until it’s time to move.”

“My girls and I will circle around,” Kaiser stated from the cover of the alleyway, “Attack from another direction.”

“Hey, no,” I replied, “That’s not the deal.  We’re in groups like this for a reason, and that reason flies out the window if we split up like that.”

“I didn’t ask your permission,” Kaiser replied, his voice cool.  Without waiting for a response, he turned to leave, Fenja and Menja following him.

“Are we going to stop them?” I asked.

“I could catch up to them,” Bitch told us, as she rode Brutus back towards our group.

Newter shook his head, thin lips pressed into a line that only accented his strange appearance, “Not worth it, and dangerous to fight amongst ourselves in enemy territory.  We don’t have time, anyways.”

“Bitch, can you call Grue and Tattletale, let them know?” I asked.  “They can take measures if they need to.”

She nodded and got her cell phone out.

While Bitch made the call, Newter beckoned the others to gather in a huddle.  “Let’s talk plan of attack.  Skitter, Bitch, you two have the most experience dealing with these guys, so start us off.”

I glanced at Bitch.  She was busy with the call, and she had been out of action during our last encounter with the ABB, which left her kind of in the dark as far as Bakuda went.  It was up to me.

I silently cleared my throat, then I spoke up, “Bakuda likes to set traps, and if this place is important enough to patrol, it’s important enough to have some traps.  Let me send my bugs in first.  I can get the lay of the land, and the bugs will also confuse and distract anyone inside, which should make things easier on you guys.”

Newter nodded once, “Okay.  That’s step one.  Bitch, can you and your dogs hit the ground floor?  I’ll go in the second floor window.”

Bitch gave him a curt nod in response.

“The bugs won’t bite her?” Newter asked.

“No,” I answered, “Won’t bite you either.”

“They couldn’t if they tried,” Newter answered me, smiling.  Funny, if you looked past the odd appearance – the blue hair, the weird eyes, the orange skin and the tail, he was actually a pretty good looking guy.

“Sundancer, what can you do?” Newter asked.

“I guess you could say I’m artillery,” Sundancer replied, “But I’ve got the same problem Ballistic does – er, my other teammate.  I’m not sure I can use my power without hurting a lot of people really badly.”

“Then stay back with Labyrinth.  You two be ready to cover our retreat or move in if we run into trouble,” Newter replied.

“Sounds like you know what you’re doing,” I commented.

“Maybe some of Faultline has rubbed off on me.”  He smiled.  Then he glanced at his watch, “Twenty seconds.”

Newter glanced at the two soldiers Coil had sent, “You two, can you-”

“We’re taking a position on this rooftop, here,” the shorter of the two men replied, pointing up to the two story duplex next to us.  “We’ll support you with cover fire.”

“Uh, good.  Try not to kill anyone,” Newter said, checking his watch again, “Five seconds.  Skitter?  Start us off?”

I reached out to all the bugs I’d gathered, minus the ones I was keeping beneath my costume.  I directed them towards the side of the building we were facing.

The swarm swept in through windows that were open or broken and the one open door on the side of the building, flowing into the hallways.  I made sure to spread them out to cover every surface, feeling for anything that was out-of-place or unusual.  There were a fair number of people inside, which wasn’t a huge surprise, but my bugs were making a lot of contact with bare skin.  I realized the people gathered in the open area of the warehouse’s ground floor were nearly naked.  Stripped down to their underwear.  It was so unexpected that it threw me off my stride.

I shook my head.  I couldn’t afford to get distracted.  Bakuda probably used metals and plastics, and to the superfine senses of the bugs, that was an entirely different texture from the walls.  I tried to filter out the usual stuff and get a feel for just the plastic or metal things.  Just a few feet in from the entrance, I found two dome-shaped bulges on either side of the stairwell that led to the second floor, metal and plastic.

“There’s something there,” I said.  “Give me a second.”

I took a page out of Grue’s playbook and gathered a group of bugs together into a densely packed, vaguely humanoid shape.  I moved that collection of bugs through the doors and to the place where the little domes sat.

The explosion blew a fair sized chunk out of the exterior wall of the building closest to us.  The people inside, already nervous at the influx of bugs, started scattering, screaming, running for the exits.

“Holy shit!” Newter’s eyes went wide.

“Motion detectors, I think,” I said, “Or proximity activated.  My bugs wouldn’t normally set them off, had to fool them.”

The ground was too hard for landmines, so I focused on having the remainder of the bugs sweep through the rest of the building, skimming the surfaces and looking for more trouble.  I found two more, checked nobody was near, and used the same method to detonate them.  The plumes of flame, smoke and debris were visible from where we crouched.

“Twenty or thirty people on the ground floor, unarmed and half naked, ten in upstairs office, armed,” I said, “Route is as clear of traps as I can get it.  Go!”

Bitch lunged into action, Newter only a few steps behind.  He half-ran, half-crawled, his tail whipping around behind him, presumably to help keep his balance.

As Bitch had her dogs crash into and through the closed metal loading bay door, Newter intercepted the first few people to leave through the fire exit door on the side of the building.  He leaped to close fifteen foot gaps as fast as I could have thrown a punch, moving from one person to the next, dropping each of them in an instant.  Lots of women in that group, and I could confirm with my eyes what my bugs had told me – nine out of ten of the people in that group, a mix of Asian men and women, were only wearing their underwear.  Slave trafficking?  Prostitution?  Something darker?  I felt my skin crawl.

As he darted up the side of the building and slipped into an open window like a bolt of greased lightning, I felt Newter brush past several with my bugs.  Each bug that came into contact with him dropped off the wall or out of the sky, falling to the ground, alive but stunned.

I remembered reading about him on the web.  Information had been scarce, since Faultline’s crew weren’t the types of villain to appear in the papers or on TV, and the concrete details that were out there had been hard to pick apart from the speculation.  What I did know was that his bodily fluids were potent hallucinogens.  Even the sweat that accumulated on his skin was apparently enough to send someone off to la-la land, taking only a few seconds for it to be absorbed through the skin.

I focused my attention on tracking what was happening inside the building.  Newter was on the second floor, probably dodging gunfire as he moved closer to the group of people who had been in the upstairs office.  I had my bugs cluster around them, biting their hands and faces.  I sent them crawling into noses, ears and mouths to disrupt the aim of the people who might shoot Newter.

Kaiser, Fenja and Menja were attacking from the side of the building opposite us.  They had drawn the attention of most of the armed agents and patrols, leaving Bitch and her dogs stranded in the midst of one or two dozen unarmed, unclothed, panicked people.  From what my bugs were sensing, she was giving lots of commands to her dogs.

I realized, belatedly, that someone had blocked off the route Bitch might have taken to reach the fighting.  The edges of the offending barrier were thin, sharp.  Blades?  That meant Kaiser would be the one who had blocked her.  Was it intentional, or had he been cutting off the ABB’s escape routes?

I couldn’t sense what Newter was doing since my bugs couldn’t touch him, but I could feel the movement of the air that followed in his wake, I could track the locations of the bugs he came into contact with before they were brought down by the drugs, and I knew the men were collapsing as Newter moved into their midst and knocked each of them out with a touch.  One or two even collapsed without him touching them.  Something else?  Blood?  Spit?

Only one remained standing.  He and Newter circled one another.  My bugs weren’t having much effect on him, since he was wearing a bandanna or something over his face.

No, wait, there was a second person, just behind Newter.  How had I not noticed him?

Then the first disappeared, and I knew.

I grabbed my phone, accessed the contacts, and auto-dialed Bitch.

“Come on, answer, answer,” I whispered at the phone.

Then a handful of my bugs were stunned and a few more squashed as Newter collapsed on top of them.  I directed most of the bugs in the building to distract the attacker, hoping to buy Newter enough time to get away.  It wasn’t working – he wasn’t moving.

“Fuck! Answer, Bitch!”

“What’s wrong?” Sundancer asked.

“Newter’s hurt.”

Labyrinth put her hand on my shoulder, half-spun me to face her.  She didn’t say a word, her expression barely changed behind the cloth of her mask, but it was still the closest I’d seen to an emotional response from her.

I would have said something, but Bitch chose that same second to pick up.

“Bitch!  Second floor, Newter’s wounded, Oni Lee is in the building.”

There was a long pause before she replied, “Lung’s here too.”

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Hive 5.5

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Time was short, so Tattletale was in my room of the loft while I changed.

“The idea Coil proposed was that we would mix and match the members of the groups, so nobody can pull anything without their teammates being hostage to the other groups.”

“Gotcha,” I replied.  I busied myself double checking the items from the utility compartment.  Tattletale reached in and snatched the cell phone.  “Hey?”

“One sec.  I’m programming the alarm on your phone.  When it goes off, an hour from now, you call Grue.  Then again an hour later, if we’re out that long.  We’ll all be checking in with each other every fifteen minutes or so.  If someone doesn’t pick up, assume they’re in trouble.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“If you can’t pick up the phone for whatever reason, be sure to call back at the first opportunity.  Let us know you’re fine.”

“Got it.”  I hiked the cloth portion of my armor up around my waist, then began sliding my arms through the sleeves.  The cloth part was form-fitting, and all in all, putting it on was like putting on a pair of full-body pantyhose.  Not prone to tear, of course, but like the pantyhose, it always took longer than I expected.

“We’ll be using a password system every time we check in, in case you’re taken hostage and forced to answer a call.  Two parts to it.  The first part is simple, you give the other person the first letter of one of our names, the other person replies with the last.  If it winds up being a longer night, move on to other people we know.”

“So if I said L?”

“A.  How would you respond to B?”

“N.”

“Exactly.  The second part is color based.  When you’re replying to a call, name an object that’s a certain color.  Think traffic lights.  Green for go, everything is okay.  Yellow for warning, if you aren’t sure about things.  Red for stop, need help.  It lets you keep us informed without tipping off the capes that are with you.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going with the group that has Faultline, Trickster, and the Traveller’s shapeshifter.  I’m betting there will be a few from Empire Eighty-Eight and some of Coil’s soldiers, too.”

“Shapeshifter?”

“That gorilla with four arms, from the other night.  Only I don’t know exactly what she is, yet, but she’s not quite a shapeshifter.  I’m hoping to get a better sense of her abilities by spending some time around her.  Ditto for Trickster.  Regent’s coming with so we’re contributing some firepower.  Kind of.”

“Don’t you and Faultline have issues with each other?”

Lisa grinned, “Yup.  It’s going to be fun, pushing her buttons, knowing she can’t touch me.”

I winced.  “Just be careful.  What’s Grue doing?”

“Another group.  All in all, we’ll be coordinating to strike three locations simultaneously with three different teams, overwhelming force.  Hit hard, hit fast, get out of there.  If you aren’t making much of a dent, don’t sweat it.  Unless something goes horribly wrong, we’ll repeat this process a few more times over the next couple of days.”

There was a knock on the door.  Brian called from the other side, “Just about ready?”

I zipped up the back of my costume and strapped my armor in place over it, then opened the door, mask in one hand, “Ready.”

Brian, like me, was costumed but didn’t have any headgear on.  “You sure you’re up to this?  You’re recovered from the knock you took to the head?”

“No,” I admitted, “Not entirely.  But I’m pissed, and I think I’ll be less okay in the long run if I don’t go out and vent somehow.”

He paused, as if he were thinking things over, “Okay.  You going to be alright dealing with Bitch on your own?”

I frowned, “I’ll manage somehow.”

“Don’t show her any weakness, or she won’t let up on you.”

“I figured as much,” I agreed.  As we headed for the stairs, I mused that maybe Bitch and I were more on the same page today.  I was pissed at life in general, feeling just a bit off kilter in a way that wasn’t one-hundred-percent the concussion.

I pulled on my mask as we headed outside.  There was a nondescript van pulled over in front of the door, blocking line of sight to the rest of the street.  Bitch and Regent were already inside, waiting.

“Hey dork,” Regent greeted me.  He was in costume, typical except for the shirt he was wearing – other nights it had been white, but it was a dark gray today.  It was still the same slightly elaborate, puffy renaissance fair style of clothing, though.

“You can call me Skitter.  I won’t mind.”

“That’s alright,” he answered.  There was a note of humor in his voice, which I took to mean he was just having fun at my expense.  I resolved to ignore him.

Bitch just stared angrily at me.  It was so intense I had to look away.  So much for being on the same page.

The interior of the van had benches on either side.  Since we were in a rush, I had only a second to decide whether I wanted to sit next to Regent – and be facing Bitch for the duration of the trip – or plop myself down next to her and the dogs.  I opted for the former, hoping I wouldn’t manage to do or say anything that would get us off on a bad start for the evening.

Tattletale sat in the passenger seat, with Grue driving.  As the van pulled onto the road, she called back to us, “Hey, Bitch, Skitter.  We’re dropping you off first, but you’re going to have to walk to the meeting place.  You might be short on time, so walk fast.  Cool?”

Bitch shrugged, “Works.”

“No complaints,” I added my own two cents.  I could see where it would be advantageous – Bitch would have time to get her dogs beefed up, and I could gather some bugs.  Besides, it gave us something to do – if we had to stand idle for a few minutes, I was pretty sure it would only increase the chances of Bitch finding a reason to pick a fight with me or one of the other villains.

Remembering my bugs, I took a few seconds to extend my powers outward and begin gathering them.  I was surprised at how far my reach was extending.  I generally measured things in city blocks – I’ve never been good at eyeballing distance – and I would say my range usually sat at around two blocks.  Today I was reaching just shy of three and a half.

“Hey Tattletale?” I asked.

“‘Sup?”

“Two questions.”

“Go for it.”

“What general direction is the spot you’re dropping me off?  Need to know where to send the bugs.”

“Northwest.”

I glanced out the tinted windows of the van to judge which direction we were going, then began giving commands to the bugs that fell within my reach.

“Second question.  Um.  My power’s a fair bit stronger today.  Not sure about technique, but I’m extending a lot further.  Any idea why?”

“Can’t say.  Sorry, I could usually try to figure it out, but I’m focusing on other things right now.  If you think it’s really crucial-”

“No,” I stopped her, “It’s not.  I’ll bug you about it later, when your attention isn’t divided.”

“Pun intended?” Regent mused.

“What?”

“Guess not.  Nevermind,” he chuckled a little.

Bitch was using her power on her dogs.  It was really my first opportunity seeing it happen from the beginning.  It was like seeing a sausage split its casing, only the casing was fur and skin.  Where the rifts appeared, it wasn’t just muscle spilling out, but spears and ridges of bone.  Some of the exposed muscle shriveled into scaly growths.  Yet they kept growing to the point the back of the van was feeling crowded.  Where did that mass come from?  Was it pulled out of thin air, or was she drawing in some kind of energy and converting it into matter?

For that matter, if my brain was a radio tower of sorts, pinging every bug for their locations on a near-constant basis and sending them instructions to override their own brains… where was the energy to keep that up coming from?

It was a little disconcerting to think about.

When Grue stopped the van to let us out, I realized why we were walking.  Our stop was a bridge with bus stations on either side.  Problem was, it seemed the ABB had decided to cut off this route – the bridge had been reduced to rubble.  Large orange and black detour signs with blinking lights barred entry to the shattered bridge, and similar measures had been used to cordon off the piles of rubble below.

Tattletale leaned out the open window and pointed, “See that tower, there?  Looks like a lighthouse?  It’s an old tourist shop that closed down a decade ago.  It’s where the Merchants – Skidmark and his crew of dealers – hung out, before the ABB expanded and forced them out.  You’re supposed to meet the others there.”

I looked and saw the building she was pointing at.  It didn’t look much like a lighthouse, but whatever.  “Gotcha.”

“Go,” Brian said, “Good luck.”

Bitch whistled for her dogs, and we headed for the stairs.  We’d have to head down, across the street and back up to get where we needed to be.

It was weird, picking our way through the rubble of the destroyed bridge to cross the street.  You didn’t usually cross the road like this, and the streets were deserted here.   The dogs seemed to like the experience though.  I saw Judas’ tail wagging as he hopped from one slab of road to another.

I pulled open the door with shattered glass panes that led to the other set of stairs, letting Bitch and the dogs through.  As she passed me, Bitch murmured, “You’re angry.”

“Yeah,” I admitted, “Bunch of stuff earlier this afternoon.  Didn’t go the way I wanted.  Assholes.”

“Should hit ’em.  Teach them to fuck with you.”

“I did,” I answered, “Knocked one of them on her ass last night.  Part of the reason things didn’t go so hot, today.”

“Mmm.  Story of my life.”

We headed up the stairs and towards the lighthouse.  My bugs were starting to accumulate.  Our detour had given the flying bugs time to catch up to me.  Wasps, moths, houseflies, no-see-ums, a few bees and a fair few cockroaches.

I’d learned my lesson on our last outing.  I wasn’t going in unprepared and unarmed.  As they arrived, I drew the bugs close.  Selecting the best of them, I directed them under my armor – in the hollow space beneath my shoulderpads, under my belt, my elbows and wristguards, in my hair and the concave panel of armor that covered my spine.  They were there if I needed them.  I doubted anyone would notice unless I let them.

“How’d you know I was angry?” I asked.

“Dunno.  Looked that way.”

“Yeah, but you can’t see my face.”

“Way you’re standing, I guess.  You going to get on my case about this?”

“No.  Sorry,” I answered.

I decided to keep quiet for the rest of our trip to the ‘lighthouse’.  Interestingly, she almost seemed to relax as the silence lingered.  Her face lost that slightly angry expression and she reached over to scratch Brutus on the side of his neck in what seemed a very normal, casual gesture, for someone I viewed as anything but.  Or at least, it would have been normal and casual if the dogs weren’t currently the size of small ponies.

We reached the lighthouse, and sure enough, there was a group of villains waiting.

Kaiser was first and foremost among them.  He was decked out head to toe in elaborate, ornate armor with a crown of blades, but the configuration, I noticed with interest, was totally different than it had been just two days ago.  Fenja and Menja stood at either side of him.

Only one of the Travelers was accompanying our group: The girl with the sun design on her costume, red suns on black form-fitting armor.  Just behind her were two members of Faultline’s crew. Newter was hanging off the wall by his fingertips and toes, and Labyrinth was leaning against the same wall, just below him, her arms folded.  Newter was wearing tattered jeans and had dyed his hair a cobalt blue, setting off the orange of his skin.  He had cloth wrap, like you’d see a kickboxer use, wrapped around his hands and feet.

Rounding out our group were two men in matching kevlar armor, with balaclavas, visors, and tricked out assault rifles.  Each of the men had a second gun slung over their back – I thought one was another rifle, but I didn’t have a good view of the other.  I might have pegged it a grenade launcher.  Coil’s men, probably.

Fenja or Menja – I wasn’t sure which – leaned over and whispered in Kaiser’s ear.

“Arrived with less than a minute to spare, Undersiders,” he purred.  “Watches out, everyone.”

I paused – I hadn’t brought one.  Then I remembered the cell phone.  I retrieved it from the compartment, the cluster of bugs I had in there moving automatically out of the way of my hands.  If anything, they made it easier to know where my fingers should reach to grab it.

“Set time to four-forty in three, two, one… set.  The attack is scheduled to start in five minutes.  We’ll use the time to get there, get in position and decide our method of attack.”

Nobody argued.

“Move out,” he directed us.

Bitch turned her attention to Brutus, who made a groaning noise as he suddenly swelled.  Splits appeared in his skin as he grew another two or three feet taller at the shoulder, and spikes of bone erupted from his exterior.  He stretched, then shook abruptly, spraying all of us with the bloody aftermath of his sudden growth.  There were reactions of alarm and startled shouts from everyone present, with the exception of myself, Bitch and Labyrinth.  Kaiser, surprisingly, was among them, backing away several steps before he realized Brutus wasn’t attacking.

There was a bit of swagger in her posture as Bitch walked the two steps to where Brutus stood, grabbed a spike of bone and hauled herself onto his back.

It was intentional, maybe a bit immature, but she’d made Kaiser flinch.  Taking him down a notch like that, so soon after he’d assumed control of this impromptu team, it was probably more of a statement than anyone present could have accomplished with words.

As if to drive the point home, she gave Brutus a light kick in the ribs, prompting him to walk in the direction Kaiser had indicated.  Judas, Angelica and I were right behind her.  I didn’t turn to see how long it took the others to pull themselves together and follow.

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Hive 5.1

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The place was nondescript.  A hole in the wall in the midst of a long street of hole in the wall businesses.  Everything was run down.  For every given store or restaurant you passed, you could only guess if the place was still open or not.

The pub had a sign on it reading ‘Somer’s Rock’.  There were iron bars on the windows and the curtains were drawn, but it would have been more unusual if that wasn’t the case.  It was that kind of area.  The paint on the outside was peeling, and the rust from the bars had bled onto the gray-white paint below the windows.

As we stepped inside, it became clear that Somer’s Rock was one book that should be judged by its cover.  It was dim, dingy and depressing.  The wood floor was stained the same dark gray as the counter of the bar, the curtains and tablecloths were dark green, and the only real color or brightness, if you could call it that, was the yellow light cast by ancient, burnt lightbulbs.

There were three people in Somer’s Rock when we arrived.  One was a sullen looking twenty-something girl with brown hair and a slightly wrinkled server’s uniform, who glanced at us as we came in, but made no attempt to welcome us.  There were two identical twins behind the bar in the far corner, probably her older brothers, busying themselves with washing glasses and studiously ignoring us.  One of them was wearing a dress shirt and apron, looking the part of a bartender, while the other had a black t-shirt under a Hawaiian shirt.  Besides the contrast in fashion, they were identical in height, haircut, features and expression.

A group of tables had been pulled together with chairs arranged around them, but we walked past them to a corner booth.  Tattletale, Bitch, Grue, Regent and I all arranged ourselves on the worn cushioned benches.  I was calling them that in my head, really, because they weren’t Lisa, Brian, Rachel and Alec.  We were all in costume.

As we settled in, the girl with the dour expression approached us, setting her notepad down on the table and then stared at me, the look in her eyes almost challenging.  She didn’t say a word.

“Coke?” I ventured, feeling uncomfortable under the look.

“No, Skitter,” Tattletale nudged me, “She’s deaf.  If you want something, write it on the pad.”  To demonstrate, she reached across the table, took the pad and wrote ‘tea, black’.  I took her cue and wrote down my order, then passed the note across the table to the boys and Bitch.  The girl gave me an ugly look as she walked away with our orders.

It had been a week since the incident with Bakuda.  Lisa and Brian had stopped by several times as I spent my days in bed, giving me updates on the situation as it unfolded.  At one point they had even brought Alec and Bitch, and I’d been very relieved my dad hadn’t been home at the time.  Alec and Bitch weren’t the polite houseguests that Lisa and Brian were, and I suspected their presence and personalities would have raised more questions with my dad than they put to rest.

Apparently someone at the PHQ had named my costumed self ‘Skitter’.  Lung had overheard something about it, and it had now spread through the city in the aftermath of his escape, which implied he was probably looking for me.  As a newspaper article raised our possible involvement in the bombings that had taken place, as adversaries of Bakuda, my new name had come up yet again, so it looked like it was maybe catching on.  I didn’t love it, but I didn’t love any of the names I’d come up with, so I could cope.

It seemed that we had arrived a few minutes early, because the rest of the guests arrived within seconds of each other, as the server brought us our drinks.

Kaiser came through the door with a girl on each arm, blondes with measurements like Playboy models.  Kaiser wore armor head to toe, elaborately worked and topped with a crown of blades.  The leader of Empire Eighty Eight.  The twins went by the names Fenja and Menja, and were decked out in Valkyrie-style armor featuring countless little steel wings, along with closed-face helms.  Had to admit, Kaiser liked his heavy hitters.  These two could grow to be three stories tall, and they were a hundred times more durable when they were.

Purity entered a few steps behind him with several others following her.  She was dressed in a white costume without any markings or symbols on it, but the fabric glowed softly.  Her white hair and eyes glowed too, but it was more like they were made of heated magnesium than anything else.  I couldn’t look in her direction without getting spots in my eyes, and my mask had tinted lenses designed to reduce glare.

The people that had come in with Purity were other members of Empire Eighty Eight.  Krieg, Night, Fog and Hookwolf.   It was interesting to see, because as far as I’d known, while every one of them had been a member of Empire Eighty Eight at some point in time, Purity had gone solo, while Night and Fog had splintered off to form their own duo in Boston not long after.  All reunited, apparently.

That wasn’t even Kaiser’s entire team.  Aside from the rare exception like Lung reaching out to Bakuda when she’d been at Cornell, it seemed that most groups recruited new members from within their own city.  Kaiser was different.  He was one of the better known American villains with a white supremacist agenda, and people sharing his ideals were either recruited from other states or they came to him.  Most didn’t stay with him for too long, for whatever reason, but it still made him the Brockton Bay resident with the most raw parahuman muscle at his beck and call.

Kaiser sat at one end of the table in the center of the room, his people finding seats and chairs at the tables behind him.  Purity didn’t relax or order drinks, though.  She sat in a chair a few feet behind Kaiser, folded her arms and crossed one ankle over the other, settling in to watch the proceedings.  From my research online and digging through old newspaper articles,I knew Purity could create light and charge it with kinetic energy.  She was like a human flashlight, if the light from the flashlight could punch through brick walls and tear city buses in half.  As far as raw firepower went, she was up near the top of the list, a flying artillery turret.

Coil entered after Empire Eighty Eight, all the more conspicuous because he was alone.  No backup, no show of force.  He was taller than Grue, but he was thin to the point of being skeletal.  His skintight costume covered him head to toe, lacking even eyeholes or openings for his nose and mouth, and the way it clung to his skin let you see his individual ribs and joints.  The costume was black, and the only design on it was a white snake, with its head starting at Coil’s forehead, the tail extending down the back of his head, looping and winding over his entire body before finally ending at one of his ankles.  He sat at the end of the table opposite Kaiser.

“What’s his deal?” I whispered to Tattletale.

“Coil?  Can’t say as far as his powers go, but he’s one of the more powerful players in town.  Considers himself a chessmaster.  You know, like a master strategist, tactician.   Controls more than half of downtown with squads of top notch personnel in the highest end gear.  Ex-military from around the world.  If he even has powers, he’s the only one in his organization who does.”

I nodded.  Almost the opposite of Kaiser in that department.  I might have asked more, but others were streaming into the room.

Faultline.  I knew of her from my research.  She was twenty-something, and her straight black hair was in a long bristling ponytail.  Her costume was weird, approximating something like a blend of riot gear, a martial arts uniform and a dress.  Four people entered the room with her, and the two guys in the group were instantly the weirdest people in the room.  I knew them by name too.  Newter wasn’t wearing a shirt, shoes or gloves, which made it all the more apparent that his skin was neon orange from head to toe.  He had light blue eyes, dark red hair that looked wet and a five foot long prehensile tail.  Gregor the Snail was morbidly obese, average height, with no hair on his entire body.  His skin was milky white and slightly translucent, so you could see shadows beneath it where his organs were.  Like someone else might have bad acne, he had bits of shell or scales crusting his skin.  They looked almost like barnacles, but there was a spiral shape to them.

You wouldn’t have thought they were close by their body language, silence and the sheer difference in appearance, but both had matching tattoos.  Newter’s was just above his heart, while Gregor’s was on his upper arm.  It looked like the greek ‘Omega’ symbol, but upside down.  Maybe a stylized ‘u’.

The other two girls in Faultline’s group were very normal by contrast;  Labyrinth wore a dark green robe and mask with lines all over them.  Spitfire wore in a red and black costume with a gasmask.

I was surprised when Faultline deliberately walked by our table on her way to her seat, taking the long way around.  As she passed us, she looked over Tattletale and me and sneered a little before taking the chair to Kaiser’s right.

“I’m going to go before all the seats get taken, if that’s cool?” Grue spoke, and the rest of us nodded.  Grue sat between Faultline and Coil.

“What was that with Faultline and you?” I murmured to Tattletale, “History?”

“Nothing important,” she replied.

Regent leaned forward.  “She and Tattletale have been feuding a little.  Faultline upped the ante when she poached Spitfire from us when we were in the middle of trying to recruit her.  Can’t say why Faultline doesn’t like Tattle, but I know Tattletale hates it when people act like they’re smarter than her, and Faultline is smarter than her.  Ow.  Fuck, that hurt.”

Tattletale had kicked him under the table.

“They’re mercenaries right?” I asked.

Tattletale nodded, “Faultline’s crew does anything short of murder.  You can say her personality sucks, you can say her powers suck, but I’ll admit she’s very good at finding hidden strengths in the people that work for her.  See those two guys?  When it came to powers, they got a bad roll of the dice.  Became freaks that couldn’t hope to pass in normal society, wound up homeless or living in the sewers.  There’s a story behind it, but they became a team, she made them effective, and they’ve only messed up one or two jobs so far.”

“Gotcha,” I said, “Impressive.”

“Keep in mind, though, we haven’t screwed up any.  We’re 100%.”

“They’ve done something like three times as many jobs as us,” Regent pointed out.

“But we haven’t failed any jobs, is the important thing,” Tattletale stressed.

Another group arrived, and it was like you could see a wave of distaste wash over the faces in the room.  I had seen references on the web and news articles about these guys, but they weren’t the sort you took pictures of.  Skidmark, Moist, Squealer.  Two guys and a girl, the lot of them proving that capes weren’t necessarily attractive, successful or immune to the influences of substance abuse.  Hardcore addicts and dealers who happened to have superpowers.

Skidmark wore a mask that covered the top half of his face.  The lower half was dark skinned, with badly chapped lips and teeth that looked more like shelled pistachio nuts than anything else.  He stepped up to the table and reached for a chair.  Before he could move it, though, Kaiser kicked the chair out of reach, sending it toppling onto its side, sliding across the floor.

“The fuck?” Skidmark snarled.

“You can sit in a booth,” Kaiser spoke.  Even though his voice was completely calm, like he was talking to a stranger about the weather, it felt threatening.

“This is because I’m black, hunh?  That’s what you’re all about, yeah?”

Still calm, Kaiser replied, “You can sit in a booth because you and your team are pathetic, deranged losers that aren’t worth talking to.  The people at this table?  I don’t like them, but I’ll listen to them.  That isn’t the case with you.”

“Fuck you.  What about this guy?” Skidmark pointed at Grue, “I don’t even know his name, and he’s sitting.”

Faultline answered him, “His team hit the Brockton Bay Central Bank a week ago.  They’ve gone up against Lung several times in the past and they’re still here, which is better than most.  Not even counting the events of a week ago, he knows about the ABB and he can share that information with the rest of us.”  She gave Grue a look that made it clear that he didn’t have a choice if he wanted to sit at the table.  He dipped his head in the smallest of nods in response.  We’d discussed things beforehand and agreed on what details we’d share.

“What have you done that’s worth a seat at this table?” she asked Skidmark.

“We hold territory-”

“You hold nothing,” Grue answered, raising his voice, his powers warping it, “You’re cowards that hold onto the areas nobody else cares about, making drugs and selling them to children.”

“We sell to everyone, not just-”

“Find a booth,” Grue’s echoing voice interrupted him.  Skidmark gave him a look, then looked at the others sitting around the table.  All still, every set of eyes he could see behind the masks was staring him down.

“Assholes.  Puckered, juicy assholes, all of you,” Skidmark snarled, stomping off to the booth where his teammates already sat.

The serving girl picked up the fallen chair and restored it to its position at the table, not meeting anyone’s eyes as she walked up to the table where Kaiser’s people sat, put down her notepad and waited for everyone to write down their orders.  It struck me just why the pub had a deaf waitress.

“I’ll be taking a chair, I think,” someone spoke from the door.  Most heads turned to check out a male figure in a black costume with a red mask and tophat.  It gave me sort of a Baron Samedi vibe.  His teammates followed him into the room, all in matching costumes of red and black, differing only in design.  A girl with a sun motif, a guy with bulky armor and a square mask, and a creature so large it had to crawl on its hands and knees to get through the door.  It was hard to describe, approximating something like a four armed hairless gorilla, with a vest, mask and leggings in the red and black style its team was wearing, six-inch claws tipping each of its fingers and toes.

“The Travelers, yes?” Coil spoke, his voice smooth, “You’re not local.”

“You could call us nomadic.  What was happening here was too interesting to pass up, so I decided we’d stop by for a visit.” The guy with the top hat pulled off the first really formal bow I’d seen in my life. “I go by Trickster.”

“You know the rules, here?” Grue asked Trickster.

“We’ve been to similar places.  I can guess.  No fighting, no powers, no trying to bait others into causing trouble, or everyone else in the room puts aside all other grievances to put you down.”

“Close enough.  It’s important to have neutral ground to meet, have civilized discussion.”

“I won’t argue that.  Please, continue as if I wasn’t here.”

When Trickster took a chair and put his feet up on the table, nobody complained, though Skidmark looked like he wanted to kill someone.  The rest of the Travelers settled in a booth not far from us.  The gorilla thing sat on the floor and it was still large enough to be at eye level with its teammates.

Coil dipped his head in a nod and steepled his fingers.  When he spoke, his voice was smooth, “That should be everyone.  Seems Lung won’t be coming, though I doubt any of us are surprised, given the subject of tonight’s discussion.”

“The ABB,” Kaiser replied.

“Thirty five individuals confirmed dead and over a hundred hospitalized in this past week.  Armed presence on the streets.  Ongoing exchanges of gunfire between ABB members and the combined forces of the police and military.  They have raided our businesses and bombed places where they think we might operating.  They have seized our territories, and there’s no indication they intend to stop anytime soon,” Coil clarified the situation for all present.

“It is inconvenient,” Kaiser spoke.

“They’re being reckless,” Faultline said.  She made it sound like that was a crime on par with killing kittens.

Coil nodded, “Which is the real concern.  The ABB can’t sustain this.  Something will give, they will self destruct sooner or later, and they will likely cease to be an issue.  Had things played out differently, we could look at this as a good thing.  Our problem is that the actions of the ABB are drawing attention to our fair city.  Homeland security and military forces are establishing a temporary presence to assist in maintaining order.  Heroes are flocking to the city to support the Protectorate in regaining control of matters.  It is making business difficult.”

“Bakuda is at the center of this,” Grue joined the dialogue, “Lung may be the leader, but everything hinges on the girl.  She ‘recruited’ by orchestrating raids of people’s homes while they slept, subduing them, and implanting bombs in their heads.  She then used those bombs to coerce her victims into kidnapping more.  No less than three hundred in total, now.  Every single one of her soldiers knows that if they don’t obey, Bakuda can detonate the bombs.  All of them are willing to put their lives on the line, because the alternatives are either certain death or watching their loved ones die for their failure.  Taking her down is our ultimate goal, but she’s rigged her bombs to go off the second her heart stops, so it’s a little more complicated than a simple assassination.”

He reached into the darkness that shrouded his chest and withdrew a package.  “She videotaped the ambush she pulled on my group a week ago and left it behind when she ran.  I’ve made copies.  Maybe you’ll find it useful for getting a better understanding of her.”

Grue handed a burned CD to everyone at the table.

This was our show of strength.  The video showed everything from the point Bakuda had liquefied Park Jihoo to the second bomb she had set off in her ranks.  As the second bomb had gone off in the midst of Bakuda’s group, the camera had dropped briefly, recorded the sounds of guns going off and everything being darkened by Grue’s power, but it didn’t show us running.  It didn’t reveal our weaknesses, how lucky we’d been to get away, or how bad our circumstances had really been.  It did let everyone know what we’d been up against, let them know that we’d come out fine and had been able to attend this meeting.  That would do as much for our reputation as anything else.

I wasn’t 100% recovered from my concussion, and Alec was complaining of twinges in his arm, still, but Brian had stressed how important it was that we attend, give the illusion our team was intact, untouched. Seeing the other groups with their subtle posturing, I knew he’d been right.

“So,” Coil let the word hang in the air as he cracked each of the knuckles on his right hand individually, “We’re in agreement?  The ABB cannot be allowed to continue operating.”

There were nods and murmurs of agreement from around the table, some from the various villains gathered around the room.

“Then I suggest we establish a truce.  Not just everyone here, but between ourselves and the law.  I would contact authorities and let them know that until this matter is cleared up, our groups will restrict our illegal activity to only what is absolutely essential to our business, and we will enforce the same for those doing business in our territories.  That would let police forces and military focus entirely on the ABB.  There would be no violence, infighting between our groups, grabs for territory, thefts or insults.  We band together with those we can tolerate for guaranteed victory, and we ignore those we cannot cooperate with.”

“Just saying my group won’t be getting directly involved in this without a reason,” Faultline spoke, “We won’t be going after the ABB unless they get in my way or someone pays my rates.  It’s the only workable policy when you’re a cape for hire.  And just so we’re clear, if it’s the ABB paying, my team’s going to be on the other side of things.”

“Unfortunate, but you and I can talk after this meeting is done.  I’d prefer to keep matters simple,” Coil said, “You’re okay with the other terms?”

“Keeping on the down-low, not kicking up a fuss with other groups?  That’s status quo with my group anyways.”

“Good.  Kaiser?”

“I think that is acceptable,” Kaiser agreed.

“I was talking to my group about doing something not too different from what Coil just proposed,” Grue spoke, “Yeah, we’re cool with it.”

“Sure,” Trickster said, “Not a problem.  We’re in.”

Hands were shaken around the table.

“Funny,” Tattletale murmured.

I turned away from the scene to look at her, “What?”

“Aside from Grue and maybe Faultline, everyone’s already plotting how they can use this situation to their advantage, or fuck over the others.”

I turned back to the scene, the villains sitting around the table.  It dawned on me just how much sheer destructive potential was gathered in the room.

This could get complicated.

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