Worm

by wildbow

  Still, it made ambushing other groups easier. I could use the Clairvoyant to see where we were in analogue to the other world, then smash a doorway open, putting me right next to whoever I wanted. The song helped keep them focused on Scion, kept people from running. It wasn’t perfect, absolute control, but it was a means of keeping us all together.

  Scion hadn’t done much planning for this eventuality. For a world where everyone was against him. In every world I’d glimpsed, we were fractured, whole nations worth of good capes hanging back or fighting with the others. He’d hidden the strategies from us, but I could connect the dots.

  It was about keeping him off guard, putting him on unfamiliar footing.

  I could only hope that everyone was enough people, right now.

  I found the boy who made hands and faces out of surrounding materials. A teammate, a friend. He’d worked with me on something important.

  I put myself right in the middle of the group, collected him, and then left.

  When others moved to follow, I set another forcefield up, and retreated through a series of doors, leaving decoy doorways in my wake.

  The power booster, to give myself more control, and to enhance the song. To enhance the reality warper and everyone else I’d chosen.

  The girl who made her dreams into projections.

  The boy, her ex-friend, who could turn anything into a bullet.

  And then the man who could connect things, so the movement of one would move the other. I stepped through, and he was ready for me. He moved a short iron rod, and the partner rod caught me by the neck, pinning me to a wall.

  His partner dismissed the illusion. A displacement effect that made them appear to be where they weren’t.

  The connection man was more dangerous than he seemed. The rod that was pinning me would keep moving to the side if he kept moving his own rod. Even if there was stuff in the way. It might distort or break, but he wouldn’t feel any resistance on his end.

  My throat would probably break apart before the rod did.

  He spoke in broken English. Still more capable of speech than I was.

  I had the others behind me. The forcefield woman made a field behind him. He blocked it with another pair of rods that whipped up from the ground, connected to something in his sleeve.

  The telekinetic girl with the stuffed animals used threads, binding him. Another means of pulling him closer.

  A moment later, his cloak went rigid, fixing him to the ground. Other threads still bound his flesh, biting deep enough they threatened to draw blood.

  His partner used a power, and the threads moved five or six feet to the left. They recoiled to the telekinetic’s grasp. He backed away a step, keeping his distance from me, extending the connection between the rods so it stayed against my throat.

  The movement of things to one side wasn’t an illusion, or it wasn’t illusion only. Selective space redistribution, probably usable on light.

  He pressed me harder against the wall, speaking in a low, grave voice.

  If I could have asked, I would have asked.

  All at once, he staggered, and the pressure on my throat let up.

  A girl with a horned mask had appeared beside him, pulling his robe up around his head. She dragged him forward staggering, and heaved him into my range.

  A moment later, she was gone.

  I had all of the individuals I needed, though I had a hunch about another I’d left behind.

  I found one of the larger groups, then moved my army into position. A group of select individuals, to give me the powers I needed access to, all falling within sixteen feet of me.

  I formed the doorway, then broke it open. The final piece, for the time being. It was a group I’d initially dismissed, a group that had sat out on the battle. Now they came into play.

  Changers.

  Capes who could change their form, capes who could take on the faces of others. The clairvoyant and I dropped from a portal in the air and landed right in their midst. Crystalline forcefields appeared in the air, then lowered slowly enough that people had a chance to get out of the way.

  I picked the faces of every changer in my range, watching to make sure it was accurate.

  I couldn’t control them while they were outside of my range, so I’d do something cruder, instead.

  I chose their faces, and then I seated them on the crystalline forcefields, binding them in place with the connection man.

  I scattered them into the sky. Each one rooted to a forcefield platform.

  Then I tapped the reality warper’s power. I began shaping a world.

  I could see my blonde friend with the portal man, talking to people. Talking to… what was his name? The one who gave thinker powers. Teacher.

  He’d given the portal man the ability to talk.

  A power I was afraid of taking for myself. Because I couldn’t lose even an iota of willpower if I was going to make it through this. Because I couldn’t fall into his grasp. Because I was afraid of finding out that even he couldn’t help me.

  The portal man would explain what he’d seen. With luck, my brilliant friend would be able to connect the dots.

  The reality warper’s world was shaped. Crude, but I could use the same piece over and over again.

  A landscape of body parts, of hands and limbs, of faces.

  I used my friend, the young man who could create hands and faces.

  I began altering the city.

  Scion was in the midst of fighting a monstrous, hulking dragon-man and the warlord with the death-eating shadow. He saw the first of the faces that the reality-manipulator had created and lashed out, demolishing it.

  The dragon-man took advantage of the opening to burn him.

  Hhhe… nno f-filtttterrrs. Hhhhhisss emmmotions… rrrraww.

  Scion fought his way free, and the warlord went on the offensive, lashing out. She’d collected the bodies of the dead, as the faerie girl had collected their ‘spirits’. She was strong, though not quite as strong as she would have been if things hadn’t gone sour.

  He tore into h-her pet and the damage was permanent. She pressed forward anyways, forcing him to retreat above the skyline.

  He came face to face with the changers. Wearing his companion’s face. The face of the alabaster-skinned companion my friends had put together, other faces like them. Companions that could be. One metal-skinned boy I’d salvaged from the ruins of a recent fight had been molded into a steel-skinned companion. Another was a female mirror of Scion himself, golden-skinned.

  He moved to strike out, and I hurried to get them out of the way, using the connections and the forcefields to move them to the safest places I could find.

  Some were catching on, changing back. Others weren’t so quick in their ability to change.

  This wasn’t an attack on his body.

  I was going after his mind, his emotions.

  If the feelings were still raw after thirty years, if he hadn’t learned how to handle it, then I’d target that as his weak point.

  Sstrennggtthhth wwwwee h-have… y-yy-you ddo nottt… w-we d-dealll… with-thth l-lotsss… painnn inn-n… ou-ouhhrr livv-ves.

  Remind him of what he didn’t have. His partner, his… life cycle.

  Hands of stone emerged from around the city. More of reality warped around us. When she’d changed everything in her range into a simulation of the ‘garden’, I turned it into a portal, changed the chan— chann— station to something where it was all solid. Rock, ice, dirt.

  Then I moved her somewhere else, and started over.

  All around Scion, piece by piece, the world was changing.

  So much, so fast… it wasn’t all on my end.

  Mm-m-my ff-frrriennndsss.

  They’d connected the dots. They saw what I was doing and they were getting others on board. Illusions crafted of smoke. A space warper who could mold buildings was making faces.

  Maybe they even saw my end goal.

  My feelings swelled, and the faint si
nging that was echoing through the various phones seemed to mimic that. Was that my control being reflected through her? Or was it something on her end?

  He was reacting. Spending as much time destroying the landscape as he was on us.

  It was a sh-shift in our favor, and he was getting more agitated with every passing second.

  We were approaching a critical point.

  I pulled the changers back, and I moved to the location of some masters instead.

  Projection capes. Only a few. But it helped. I had the girl who made dreams into projections, and a clone-hybrid of two of the killers, capable of making poisonous, noxious illusions out of the landscape.

  I put her power to work, showing her what to do, then sending her to work, beyond my range.

  The song helped. The song meant that when I pushed, they kept moving.

  By the time the impulse and momentum wore off, they were well on their way, and I was gone.

  Nn-neckxt… n-nexttt.

  I took a step, and my leg gave way.

  I tried to stand, and it failed me again.

  The ones I controlled helped me to my feet. I leaned on them as they supported me.

  Neh-next, I thought, again.

  My body was failing on me.

  A part of me had hoped that when this was all over, I’d be able to retreat somewhere. I knew I’d have enemies, that there was no way I could show my face again.

  I could, I was pretty sure, get by with a good stockpile of books, a place in the middle of nowhere. Not cold, but maybe a place in the mountains or on some island. Retreat from the world.

  Then it had taken reading from me.

  It had taken my ability to understand language.

  My ability to express it.

  Now it took my body.

  My mind was sure to follow.

  The projections began to haunt him. They emerged from walls or crept around corners. Images of his deceased, slain partner. Images of others, which almost seemed to bother him more.

  If he was forming any kind of tolerance, it was slow. He wasn’t getting a chance to breathe.

  Scion was striking down these constructions faster than I could raise them.

  Up until the moment the man in gold and black armor shot his sword at him. It bought time to put more of these illusions and constructions in place.

  Scion righted himself, then hesitated.

  Fury was giving way to a kind of fear.

  I knew this fear well. It was a fear that was all too easy to fall into when one’s focus was too narrow. To be caught up in an environment, facing down a relentless torrent of negative experiences. Even the minor things added up, if you couldn’t step back to look at things in perspective.

  He fought back. That was a fairly normal thing. A lot of people fought back when they faced something like this. A lot of people liked to think they could fight back up until it stopped.

  I limped forward, my squad in step around me, filling my power’s radius.

  Those types of people tended to underestimate the tenacity of the well and truly fucked up individuals of this world.

  It was lowly, to turn to this, but I’d never pretended to be honorable, above any of that. When shit was on the line, I’d go as far as I had to.

  I had the reality warper create another doorway. Her buddy knocked it open, and she tuned it back to our original er—

  Ear—

  Earth.

  The stuttering thoughts paralyzed me for a moment. I floated up a bit to see over the rank and file of my swarm, the Clairvoyant holding on to my leg.

  My friends glanced up at me. I barely recognized them.

  I pointed at the portal.

  There was a short, fierce discussion.

  I felt my heartbeat pick up. Why weren’t they running?

  Scion was going to snap. He was going to destroy ev-everything.

  But my friend was talking into her phone.

  Scion was getting more frantic, a mix of fear and rage.

  Panic?

  Scope, scale, he was no longer reasonable about what was going on.

  If he’d been holding back so he could leave some of us alive, in the chance that another companion would show up and he would be able to resume his normal life cycle, then I was suspicious he was about to stop.

  And my friend continued talking into the phone, a stern expression on her face. She was tense.

  I tried to turn the Clairvoyant on the scene, but the view was so narrow now, I wasn’t really able to see more than I could with my own eyes. I could choose where I saw from, but that didn’t help me evaluate the crowd.

  I could see the Endbringer arrive. I’d opened a portal to Gimel in the process of making mouseholes between worlds, and she was the only one that remained.

  She sang, a shrill song that echoed in every mind I controlled, her song joining the one that echoed from the phones on belts and in pockets.

  Then she began shaping the environment. Clouds of dust took on shapes, looming over Scion.

  Everywhere he turned, he faced reminders of what he’d lost, of a loss he couldn’t figure out how to handle.

  H-he was a member of a species that had won for however many cycles, utterly bewildered when we drowned it in its defeat.

  The winged Endbringer’s attack was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He was hunched over in the air, hands on his head, knees against his chest, rotating as though gravity didn’t touch him, no conception of up, down, left or right.

  He was shaking.

  Any second.

  A slit of light appeared on the battlefield. It yawned open.

  Others began to follow.

  T-theyyyy fixxedd himmm.

  Except it wasn’t him.

  It was the faerie girl. She had him as a shadow-puppet. A ghost.

  I could hear my friend swear. The others around her were tense.

  They turned to run, sprinting through the portal.

  Thousands of doorways. She turned and looked in my direction.

  But nothing appeared nearby.

  The faerie girl was opening doorways for everyone but us. Everyone but me. People were running, fleeing into other worlds, and we were being left on our own.

  I couldn’t cc-cllose the portals I’d made with the reality warper.

  We ran, or the others ran, and I was mostly carried. We entered one world, then ducked into another door I’d left nearby. We zig-zagged between universes, using realities as cover.

  There was no sound.

  No scream, no explosion.

  It was a scouring light, no direction, no aim, nothing held back.

  The initial shockwave passed through doors, and it expanded in every direction with each door it passed through, sweeping past everything within ten miles of each portal.

  The moment we were through the last portal, I’d connected every member of the group to a forcefield. The forcefield was then flung forward, carrying us with it.

  Eased to a stop when we were out of range.

  When the light faded, there was only flatness and portals.

  I moved my hand to point, and my hand couldn’t make the gesture. My fingers refused to extend independently. I could see the hesitation on the faces of the others.

  But I could see. I could see what was going on. I led my squad forward, and the rest followed.

  I found the faerie queen, in the center of the group of rescued. Portals stood in concentric circles, with gaps so they could be navigated through. A stonehenge of glowing doorways.

  I walked, stopping in the middle of an open field. I watched.

  I saw Scion, just barely recovering.

  I saw the faerie girl, talking to others.

  I watched, and long seconds passed. Others around me were talking, just beyond my range. There was a voice in my ear, coaxing, asking questions.

  She banished two spirits, keeping the portal man. Picked two others.

  I didn’t wait for them to fully materialize. I created a doo
rway with the reality-warper and kicked it open.

  I appeared right behind the faerie queen.

  I seized her, and I seized the portal man she’d killed and claimed for herself.

  I opened a doorway to Scion, and I unfolded a cloak of portals, capturing people.

  I found the tinkers I’d left on the other earth.

  When we emerged, he didn’t react. He was lost in his own mind.

  The dream-projector fell unconscious, and was captured by her onetime friend. A glimmering of the garden-entity.

  It loomed, rising into the air before Scion.

  He recoiled, striking at it.

  My swarm, feeble as it was, formed a reaching hand. He struck at that, in turn. The impact wasn’t as strong. A distraction, maintaining pressure, nothing more.

  I opened a doorway, and I found one individual I’d left behind.

  The boy with the changing faces.

  The number man had said he’d taken a dose that had been focused on helping the entities be human.

  I couldn’t change his face intentionally.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to.

  I could feel Scion’s reaction, through my senses and the individuals I controlled.

  Hope. For just a second. Not even the faint hope he’d experienced with the fake my teammates had put together.

  Because somehow, this boy registered as being like this entity’s companion had been. Registering as the same state, as the power that made it so similar.

  In the moment that hope died, the girl with the injured hand used her power on the iron rods. Infused them with the energy he was afraid of.

  Those rods became projectiles, in another’s hands.

  His hope was gone, he was bewildered, scared.

  He didn’t try to dodge. He couldn’t or wouldn’t.

  They impaled him. One in the head, one in the chest.

  The tinkers fired their weapon. An interdimensional ram turned into a gun. They’d finished it while they weren’t under my control. Defiant was the one ready at the switch.

  I discovered why he was concerned about the power.

  It kept things from being contained. I got a glimpse, a flash of a look into the world beyond him, a world he’d shut off, to which his body was the only conduit.

  The beam tore into him and into the well.

  I moved the portals, and the beam turned to scour more of the landscape beyond Scion.