Cherry Blossom Girls 8

by Harmon Cooper

  It was impulsive to take Manchester’s form, but I was glad I did once I saw more monks, a portal opening up again and another blast of crystal cutting through the courtyard.

  Stella barely managed to stop this one, and even in my panicked, anger ridden state, I felt a skip in my heart as I watched her avoid Damon’s sudden attack.

  While he may have been injured, he was still part of this fight.

  But there wasn’t much I could say or do at that point that the CBGs didn’t already know. They were a unit, some of them more trained than others, but we all knew what had happened to Fiona.

  Rage boiling through me, I tackled a pair of monks, beating them into the ground like a drunken King Kong.

  Something hit me in the back of the head, and I turned to see that a monk had tried to kick me, the man now standing with his fists ready. I shredded his torso in half, everything red as I flung what was left of him to the other side of the courtyard, his pieces turning to dust.

  Dorian appeared before me, and flashed away again, leaving a purple ball of energy behind her. I jumped to the ground just as a pair of monks jumped at me. Dorian’s energy ball exploded, ripping them to shreds.

  I felt a burst of air next to me, and several monks went down as Michelle quickly swiped her blade across their bodies.

  We needed to find the main replicator, the one who kept creating the monks, but I had yet to see the clones forming, and in my current state of mind it was too hard to focus on something like that anyway.

  Whoosh!

  Chloe flew over me, delivering a sonic boom to the side of the temple, tossing concrete and wood into the air, taking out some of the monks on the rooftop.

  This place would be destroyed once we were done here, and I almost felt like Team America in, well, Team America World Police, destroying the Eiffel Tower just to get a few terrorists.

  But it was what had to be done, and we had gone way too far to turn back now...

  I caught Stella out of the corner of my eye casting a shield, protecting a few tourists that had just barely managed to escape the temple, screaming for them to leave, to go as far away from here as possible.

  The tourists ran off; a trio of monks landed in front of Stella, all of them dropping into position, energy radiating around their fists.

  It was a pleasure to see the vector manipulator in action, Stella pressed her arms forward as if she were conjuring mana, spinning, cutting off the first one’s head with a vector blade, the second one demarcated at the torso, the third losing his legs beneath his knees.

  All turning to dust.

  Encouraged by Stella’s attack, I jumped into the air and came down hard onto a monk, bringing my fists back and punching out another one.

  It was inevitable, a fight like this couldn’t go on forever, not without more supers joining. A portal opened up. One of the monks slipped inside, what was left of the clones turning to dust.

  This left the CBGs in the courtyard, all of us loosened up from the fight, a few wanting more. Tulip was still stomping around, Michelle had started to chill him out, and I too felt my energy starting to wane as I turned back into me.

  “This is going to cause so much trouble,” Dorian said, appearing next to me, Manchester long gone.

  “Yeah,” I told her, out of breath. “Just give me a second. I’ll figure out what to do next.”

  “Next, we find the monk,” Veronique said, coming forward defiantly, metal dropping from the air to the ground.

  “Which monk?” I asked.

  “The main one, the one leading the chanting, the one that wasn’t a damn clone,” she said. “He must know something. How could there be all of these clones in front of him without the monk recognizing they weren’t his students?”

  “Good point,” I told her, sucking in another deep breath of air. “Did any of you see where he went?”

  “I can find him!” Michelle said, a finger in the air.

  “Wait, go with Grace as well, he can’t be that far from here. Unless he took a taxi or something.”

  “Okay, okay,” Michelle said, slowly taking off toward what was left of the temple, Grace alongside her.

  “That was sudden,” Chloe said, landing next to me. “I didn’t expect you to take Manchester.”

  “I just want to be able to fight better, and I can’t fight as well in my, um, normal form. But when I take Manchester, I kick just a little more ass than your everyday Gideon.”

  “A little?” Stella asked. “Manchester was holding his own.”

  “You liked Manchester, huh?” I asked as I wiped the sweat from my brow.

  “No,” she said, looking away from me. “But he’s growing on me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Board Meeting

  Unfortunately, the head monk at the monastery, a man named Tenzin Lhodron, didn’t have a lot of information. This was mainly because he spoke only Tibetan, which meant we needed to round someone up who could actually translate.

  With the Nepali police on the scene this would become increasingly difficult, which was why we teleported back to the Pharping hostel with the monk in tow, the man not as shocked as a person normally would have been after being teleported.

  Weird.

  The Tibetan family that ran the place spoke English, and as soon as they saw us, Grace took their minds, instructing the best translator to take a step forward, who just so happened to be their daughter.

  For some reason this reminded me of Mary the Mongolian, the youth of Asia increasingly fluent in English because of globalization and the Intrawebs.

  The woman translated what the monk was telling us, and lo and behold, it wasn’t really anything we couldn’t have put together ourselves.

  “The Lama says that they came and demanded a ritual,” she explained, “so he sent all the other monks to the other monastery in the city, and then he held a ritual for them. Yesterday and today. It was supposed to be a three-day medicine Buddha ritual, but now you have interrupted it. He also wants to know who’s going to fix the monastery.”

  I exchanged glances with the CBGs and returned my focus to the monk named Tenzin, who was apparently what was known honorifically as a ‘Lama.’

  “Do you think we could be of any help?”

  “Normally, I would say yes,” Grace said, “but I think that it will be best for us to get out of the area, in case he comes back to retaliate. I don’t believe he will retaliate against the monastery, unless we are there.”

  “But I feel bad,” I said, “I don’t just want to leave them hanging.”

  “When are you going to learn that we can’t help everyone?” Veronique tapped me on the back of the head.

  “Hey,” I told her, realizing that she wasn’t trying to be rude, she was literally trying to knock some sense into me. “Look, you guys know who I am by now; it’s sort of in my nature to want to help out when I can. We’ve done a lot of illegal shit, so something like this…” An idea came to me. “Okay, we may not be able to help, but I believe I can get some funding together, and not by stealing money.”

  “I will tell him,” the translator said, relaying this information to the Lama.

  Lama Tenzin reached into the front of his robes and pulled out a wallet, handing me a business card.

  A monk with a business card? It made sense, it was the twenty-first century and why wouldn’t a monk have a way to exchange contact information?

  “Thank you,” he told me in accented English. “Thank you very much.”

  “That’s not a bad plan,” Grace said, before I could announce how I planned to get money to the group.

  “It’s not fair…” Michelle crossed her arms over her chest. “You always read his mind before he can tell us his great plans.”

  “Consider yourself lucky,” Grace said, a few of the CBGs laughing.

  “Hey, why am I always the punching bag around here?”

  “Because you’re fun to punch,” Michelle said, sinking her fist into my stomach. Lama Tenzin cringed.

>   “Dammit, dammit all,” I said, hunched over now. Ingrid and Stella were cracking up. Michelle had hit me hard enough that I instinctively activated my own healing power.

  “Shit! Shit! That wasn’t supposed to be so hard! My speed made it hurt more. So sorry, Gideon!” she said, and I could tell by the tone of her voice that she actually meant it, that she felt bad.

  “It’s okay,” I told her, my hand on my stomach. “And language. Watch your language.”

  “I didn’t expect to be fighting monks today,” Chloe said as she sat down on a chair with a wool rug on it. All the chairs in the Tibetan hostel had rugs on them with mountains or yaks stitched onto their fronts.

  “Yeah, that was unexpected,” I said, still massaging my stomach.

  “What’s this genius plan of yours to get money for the monastery?” Dorian asked.

  Our Tibetan translator stepped out of the room, Lama Tenzin following her, both discussing how the young girl had slugged me in the tum-tum (at least this was what I thought they were discussing).

  “My plan? I’m glad you asked. I’ll send an email to the Emperor of Japan. Surely that dude has some money lying around that he’d like to donate to a Tibetan monastery. They are Buddhists there, you know.”

  “But not the same kind of Buddhists they have here,” Ingrid said.

  “Same, same, but different, and I’m betting that he’ll want to help out. Everyone loves Tibetans, well, not the Chinese, but that’s an entirely different story.”

  “Why don’t Chinese people like Tibetans?” Michelle asked.

  “No, no, no,” Veronique said, stepping between us. “We aren’t going to have a long discussion about this now. We need a plan, and after you have a plan, maybe over dinner, we can discuss Tibetan and Chinese relations.”

  “Fine,” Michelle and I said at the same time.

  “We don’t have any leads now,” Dorian said, “which is sort of the problem. This was our only lead, and now that Damon is gone…”

  “You know what would be helpful?” I asked.

  Dorian shook her head.

  “It would be helpful to have a tracking device that we could plant on him. That’s one thing.”

  “How would we get close enough to do that?” Chloe asked.

  “You didn’t see back there? Michelle stabbed him.”

  “You did?” Veronique asked.

  Michelle nodded. “I stabbed Damon in the stomach. That guy is an a-hole!”

  “Good job, seriously,” Veronique told her. “You are so lethal when you put your mind to it.”

  “I try.”

  “So Michelle stabbed him in the stomach,” I said, returning to my train of thought. “What if she could put a tracking device on him next time, something small?”

  “Where we going to get something like that?” Grace asked. “Can you order it on the Internet?”

  “Actually, you probably could,” I told her. “But we may need an even smaller one, something that he wouldn’t notice, at least not at first. I will reach out to Vince Porter. I don’t know why I have a feeling he may know a guy who knows a guy, but he probably knows a guy who knows a guy.”

  “What does it mean to know a guy who knows a guy?” Michelle asked in all seriousness.

  “It means that he has some type of secret hookup,” Ingrid explained.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “So, we put a tracking device on him the next time we see Damon, I get that, but what about actually seeing him, how are we going to make this happen again?” Ingrid asked. “Because if this was our only angle, we’ve now used up our only chance to tag him.”

  “This is going to sound crazy, but an idea came to me just now, something that will take some working parts to pull off.”

  “Go on,” Dorian said.

  “We have sort of talked about it before, but what if we could figure out a way to force Angel and Damon Lord to go against one another? They are already enemies, but what I’m saying here is that we figure out a way to force them to fight. Not only would this give us a chance to hopefully put a tracking beacon on Damon Lord, to see where he keeps going, but it may take out some of our enemies.”

  “I get it,” Veronique said, “but how are we going to force them to attack one another? We can’t just call both of them up and ask them to meet us.”

  “What if we can?” I asked her.

  Veronique raised an eyebrow at me. “What are you suggesting here?”

  “I’m saying we have done something similar before, but it didn’t work the way that we wanted it to work.”

  “In Seattle?” she asked.

  Stella nodded. “So you are saying to put ourselves out in the open with the hopes that they will both attack us at the same time, right?”

  “What if I took it a step further than that?”

  “Call them out?” Grace asked, her eyes white.

  “Don’t read ahead,” I told her. “But yes, what if we just doxed the hell out of them? We set a time, we set a place, and we start revealing everything that we know. Now, some people might not believe it, and some may call it fake news, you know the type, so what if we did something that we didn’t do as much in Seattle, what if we actually publicly displayed our powers? I mean, really displayed them.”

  “The people that are going to believe that we have powers already believe it, and those that think the videos of the fight in Seattle are faked won’t change their minds,” Veronique said.

  “True, but I have an idea, leverage that we can use. At least to get Damon Lord there. Now, getting Angel and crew may be a little bit harder, but they may show up if they assume that Damon is coming.”

  “That is a lot of superpowered people fighting at the same time,” Chloe said. “I know that we are all excited to do something about Damon Lord, and hopefully track him, but if Angel brings some of the other AEFL members, it could get pretty hairy. And what if he brought Mother? I know that she was recovering for a while because of what Michelle did to her…”

  “I stabbed her,” Michelle said.

  “You and your knives,” I told her, imagining what it would be like to be on the receiving end of one of Michelle’s attacks. It made me cringe thinking about it, the blade pressing through my skin, cutting through muscle, flesh, possibly organs.

  It was not pretty, and while I had experienced unthinkable pain in my role as the lone Cherry Blossom Boy, I couldn’t recall a time that I had been stabbed.

  “We can’t telepath-proof ourselves, but we can prepare for other things they may do. We just have to focus on sticking together, and getting out of there once we either take Damon Lord down, or get some type of tracking on him,” Veronique said.

  I nodded. “Good point. With that many supers there, it will be hard to really focus and take him down. But if we could track Damon, we may figure out where he’s hiding. Another option would be to go back to America and deal with Hummingbird, but if we did this correctly, we could get information on Damon Lord, possibly pit him against Angel, and then go back to America and deal with Hummingbird.”

  “There are a lot of variables in there,” Grace said. “And we don’t know if Hummingbird is still in Mexico.”

  “Well, we don’t really have another option except trying to find him down there,” I said. “Unless he sends more robots, but again, that’s not going to help us find him necessarily. However…”

  Grace and I locked eyes, hers flashing white. “We could find out where he’s manufacturing the robots. There’s something we haven’t tried yet.”

  “That’s actually not a bad idea,” Dorian said.

  “You know, Hummingbird may be scanning this area now, considering the attack that just happened here. I don’t know if he’ll send robots just yet, because he could be assuming that we teleported to another city, or to a different country even. But maybe if we went back to the monastery, and got on TV, or on the Internet, robots would come.”

  “And then we disassemble them, and try to figure out wher
e they came from, right?” Veronique asked.

  “Which I can help with,” said Grace, “if human hands touched them.”

  “Even then, there must be some parts that are labeled; we’ll probably be able to find a part that leads us to where he’s manufacturing them,” I said.

  “Definitely,” Dorian said, and the others nodded in agreement. “It’s a start.”

  “So let’s go stir up some robots,” Stella said, grinning at me.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Robot Detectives

  The CBGs arrived on the scene, Stella immediately erecting a barrier around us and Grace taking over the minds of anyone who spoke or understood English, letting them know to clear out of the area and to help others.

  We were back in the courtyard of the monastery, and it still pained me to see just how demolished the place was.

  I could tell it had already affected some of the local community as well. A few of the Tibetan women were crying, Nepalis stood around with their heads hung, children were not quite sure what had happened, but felt their parents’ grief.

  All of them had to go, all of them except for the news media, who Grace instructed to stick around.

  “I guess we can do some practice cleanup work until the robots get here.”

  I had already replaced Tulip’s power with Veronique’s, which I figured would be most helpful against Hummingbird’s deadly androids. I used this power to start moving a few things in the courtyard, most notably a statue that had fallen.

  It was heavy lifting too, and I was surprised that I was actually able to get it to stand upright.

  “You’re getting better,” Veronique said, as she used a flick of her hand to move a series of prayer wheels.

  Ingrid took her beast armor and used her enhanced strength to start moving pillars, while Michelle zipped around, checking the rubble. Chloe stacked brick, Grace continued to manage the crowd and Dorian between all of us, her paintbrush at the ready.

  We were in a remote city in Nepal, so I wasn’t surprised that it took nearly an hour for the robots to appear. In that time we had done a lot of cleanup, at least making it a bit easier for the crew that would eventually be responsible for picking up the place.