“Tíng!” one of the members in the rear called out.
They dropped to the ground, their landings practiced, wheeling around a hundred and eighty degrees by planting one foot on the ground and sweeping the other out.
His forcefield was up before he even knew what the threat was. Individually weak, strong in formation: a makeshift bubble of overlapping forcefields twenty feet over their heads.
The glowing projectile swiftly grew in his perspective, giving him only a second to brace himself before it crashed down on the wall of forcefields.
The wave of heat was intense, even on the other side of the barrier. It seemed almost liquid as it spilled out over the edges. In seconds, they were surrounded in flame. The forcefields sealed it off, prevented superheated air from burning them alive, but the viscosity meant it was resting against the forcefield.
Magma?
They’d drilled on abstracts, on possible situations. Attacks from any direction. Attacks in various forms. He’d never really considered the ideas behind dealing with magma, but he had the tools. Being a member of the Yàngbǎn meant being constantly drilled. They took your power, all but a fraction of it, but every member of the group had that same fraction. Every member was expected to know how to use every power, to know when and to do it in unison with the rest of the squad.
A small handful of individuals in the C.U.I. hadn’t been brought onto the group. Null, the cape who made the Yàngbǎn possible, was independent. He couldn’t be a part of the whole. Others included Tōng Líng Tǎ, who had a power that was too slow to use, not worth the fractional decrease in power that came with including her in the network, Shén yù, the strategist, and Jiǎ, the tinker that supplied the C.U.I. with its devices, including the simulations for the drills.
It was those drills and simulations that allowed him to react a precious fraction of a second faster as he responded. It kept him in sync with the others in the group as he joined half of them in letting his forcefield dissipate, simultaneously reaching out to apply another power.
Thirty-second path. Nullification waves.
The effect was short ranged, and he could see the shifting in the air as it extended, passed through the gaps in the forcefield where the magma and heated air were only just beginning to leak through miniscule gaps.
The waves generated by thirty-two served to stabilize. It stalled things in motion, warmed up cold things, cooled warm things. It silenced, stilled.
The magma cooled with surprising rapidity, but then, the power was affecting the inside at the same time it affected the outside, rather than trying to cool the outside to a degree that would extend inward.
Path thirty-two. It made him think of Thirty-two, the member. The source of that particular power. He snuck a glance at her.
She was one of four outsiders, four people not native to China. She’d been his closest ally. Something more.
“Dǎpò,” Seven ordered.
Like the others, the maneuver was a practiced one. The last forcefields dropped, and the group mobilized. Odd-numbered members of the squad crouched, legs flexing, while even-numbered members, Cody included, reached out.
Path fourteen. Vacuum spheres.
The odd-numbered members of the group pierced the barrier of cooled magma, and the vacuum spheres scattered the shards.
Another sphere was already in the air, aimed close to them, if not at the exact same spot.
Without even thinking about it, he trained a laser on it. Others were doing the same, or following suit. The glob of magma, still mid-air, was separated into loose pieces, no longer as aerodynamic as it had been. It expanded, fell short, disappeared into the cityscape between them and Behemoth.
Each action Cody performed as a part of the unit was validating, affirming. It was a series of small payoffs for the drills he’d gone through for over a year, with smaller groups and the Yàngbǎn as a whole. The drills had been intense, with one new situation every one or two minutes, like flash cards, only they were holograms, color coded polygons and shapes with just enough mass that they could be felt. If they failed the scenario, the offending members of the squad would be named out loud, the scenario shuffled back into the list of possibilities, so it might repeat in five minutes, or two hours.
Cody was well aware of what they were really doing, between the six hours of drills and the twelve hours of schooling that combined lectures on the C.U.I. with traditional education. He knew why they only got forty-five minutes in total to eat for their two daily meals, only five hours of rest a night, why every minute of the day was scheduled.
He’d always told himself that he wouldn’t be a victim, that when the time came and he was indoctrinated into a cult, he’d recognize the targeted isolation, the practice of tiring him out so he’d be more amenable to suggestion, more likely to conform. He’d told himself that he would rebel and maintain his individuality.
So stupid, to pretend he had that degree of willpower, in the face of crushing social pressure and exhaustion. It had taken him nearly five days after he left the basic training and joined the official team before he realized what was going on. The saddest part of it was that he was fully aware they were brainwashing him, indoctrinating him, and there was nothing he could do about it. Despite himself, despite the pride he’d once had as a person, he wanted acceptance.
They were a poor surrogate, a surrogate he hated, in a way, but he had nothing else. His family was a universe away, his friends had turned on him, gone mad.
There was a crash, and a shockwave ripped through the area, momentarily clearing the smoke. Cody instinctively raised his forcefield.
Behemoth was there, standing amid leveled buildings, fighting some flying capes who strafed around him. He had built up some steam, and lightning coursed over his gray flesh, illuminating him. Only one or two of the metal ships were still fighting. Other craft, airborne, seemed focused on evacuating, but it was a gamble at best, as shockwaves and lightning struck them down.
The smoke filled the sky once more, obscuring Cody’s vision too much for him to see any further.
Behemoth clapped again, then again, each collision of claw against claw serving to extend the damage one step further, clearing obstructions out of the way for the next.
The Yàngbǎn backed away, spreading out inadvertently. Cody could feel the benefit of the second path fading, the enhanced powers the others granted slipping from his grasp.
“Tā shì fúshè kuòsàn,” Three said. He said something else that Cody couldn’t make out. Something about leaving.
The group moved out, flying low to the ground, and Cody was a fraction of a second behind, pushed himself to make sure he was in formation.
“Radiation,” Thirty-two said, her English perfect, unaccented. It was for Cody’s benefit, and the benefit of the other two English-speaking members of the group, who might not understand the more complicated words. She got glances from the other members of their squad, but continued speaking. “He’s using the shockwaves to spread irradiated material across the city. We’re retreating, okay?”
Cody nodded, but couldn’t bring himself to speak as the group took flight. It was unnecessary, wasn’t worth it when he accounted for how the others would react and respond if he used English. Thirty-two would be shunned for doing so, there was no need for him to join her.
An explosion of smoke bloomed out in front of them.
Not smoke. Darkness.
The Yàngbǎn collectively dropped into fighting stances, ready to use any power the instant it was called for.
Villains stepped out of the smoke, and it was only then that the benefits of the twenty-third path belatedly granted the Yàngbǎn their ability to sense these people. The power had been blocked by someone or something in the group.
They were Westerners, by the looks of them. Cody’s eyes narrowed as he studied them. A guy with a demon mask, surrounded by the same eerie darkness that formed a wall between the group and Behemoth, a young girl with a horned mask, a stocky
guy or girl with a thick fur ruff on their hood, and a girl in black with an opaque pane over her face and a crossbow in her hands.
The other group was also mounted, but clearly distinct in style, even if they’d shuffled together with the other group. The boy in medieval clothes with a silver crown, the girl in a frock, two grown women in evening gowns.
They were all mounted on mutants. He had to reach for the name. The guy from Boston, Blasty? Blasto. He was supposed to make horrific mutants. Maybe he was here.
The Yàngbǎn edged around the group, wary.
“Jesus,” the man with darkness shrouding him said. His power was billowing out around him, more darkness. “What the hell are you doing?”
He’s getting the benefit of the power boost, Cody thought, but he didn’t speak.
The others were shifting uncomfortably, but the one with the white mask and silver crown, and the two in the evening gowns… they seemed to take it more in stride.
Something about them, it tugged at a memory. Not a strong memory, but a brief encounter at some point… it gave him an ugly, twisting feeling in his gut.
He blinked, and the girl with the gray, horned mask was right in front of him. He resisted the urge to react. His teammates, he knew, were raising their hands in anticipation of a fight. They were distrustful. They’d been taught that foreign heroes were dangerous, unpredictable.
Thing was, they were right. As a rule, capes were fucked up. People were fucked up. The Yàngbǎn, Cody mused, resolved the situation by stripping capes of their humanity.
She turned around, as if she hadn’t just appeared in front of him. “Shit, you weren’t kidding. It gets stronger as you get closer to more of them. I can do practically anything, and they don’t react.”
“No idea,” the man in black said.
“They’re Chinese capes,” a woman in a yellow evening gown said. “They probably don’t speak enough English to answer.”
Something nagged at him. Cody searched his memories. Between the crossbow and the boy in the renaissance era clothes, he couldn’t help but think of the game he’d played with his friends before everything went horribly wrong. But the evening gowns, those masks…
Accord. The bastard who had taken him, who had traded him to the Yàngbǎn for money.
The anger was refreshing, startling, and unexpected. A splash of scalding water to the face, as if waking him from a dream.
“Thirty-six!” It was Thirty-two calling.
“Thirty-six?” the girl with the horns asked. “What?”
It was Cody’s name. His new name, rather, but he’d never quite identified by it. He turned and realized he’d dropped out of formation.
“Let’s go,” she said.
He glanced back at the woman in yellow.
“I can guess what you’re thinking, but it’s not worth it,” she said.
Every step of the way, I got fucked. Fucked by Krouse, fucked by the Simurgh, fucked by Noelle, fucked by Accord, fucked by the fucking Yàngbǎn.
The woman in yellow spoke. “Whether it’s answers, or revenge, or something else entirely, you won’t find any of it here.”
Others in her group were looking at her in surprise, or as much as one could, when wearing masks.
“Do you know how easy it would be to kill you?” Cody asked.
Three gave an order in Chinese. Incomprehensible, but Cody could guess.
“If you killed me,” the woman in yellow said, “He’d barely care, and you’d spend the rest of your life in a hole that Ziggurat made, if they didn’t just paralyze you from the neck down and leave you alive to borrow your power.”
Ziggurat? Oh. Tōng Líng Tǎ, the earth mover.
She’d said she didn’t have answers, but this-
The ground shook violently. Behemoth was still active. Lightning was arcing through and around the dark clouds of smoke that were rising at the edges of the city.
“If it’s alright, we should go,” the darkness man said. “Things get much worse, I’m not sure how much we can help, and I’m losing my mind waiting like this.”
There was a whistle from someone in the group, and they were gone, the mutant quadrupeds breaking into a run.
And Cody was left standing there, staring.
Three snapped something, and Thirty-two translated, “He’s saying we can send you back, if-”
“No. It’s fine,” Cody said. He turned and fell into formation. The disapproval was like a weight on him from all sides. He withered a little. How many weeks, months or years would it be before he was allowed to hold a conversation with his comrades?
More heroes were running by, now. A group of young heroes, a cluster of religious capes with halos and crosses worked into their costumes, and a fresh wave of mechanical ships. The reinforcements had arrived.
Eight said something, but the accent was too thick for Cody to make it out.
He’d been stirred from a delirium, a state where the days had blended into one another, where the sole defining moment of his week might be if he were acknowledged by the other members or rebuked. It wasn’t Behemoth who’d shaken him from that point. It was the woman in yellow.
Anger twisted in his gut, and it wasn’t going away. He found himself holding onto it, embracing it.
As if it reflected the violence within Cody, the city was burning, shattered and gripped in chaos. Thousands were in the streets, running between flimsy looking buildings crusted with signage, or lying dead, struck down by shockwaves created by a monster half a mile away. Women, children.
They passed injured, and didn’t spare a second glance. A family of five were caught in a ring of burning structures, and the Yàngbǎn didn’t even spare a second glance.
We’re military, not heroes.
The goal was to fight the monster, to support the Yàngbǎn and support the C.U.I. in any way possible.
Three changed course, and the rest flew after him, setting down. Their destination was a flattened building, with a group of dead, maimed and dying Indian capes lying in the debris.
Cody exercised the twenty-third path to find out what Three surely knew already. There was nobody nearby.
Three reached down, and others around him joined in, making contact with one of the dying.
It took nearly a minute, to attune everything the right way. But the effect took hold, and the injured hero disappeared.
Five looked to Cody and pointed at the next one.
Lowest rung on the totem pole. If I didn’t think Null would rescind my powers, I’d kill you here and now.
Reluctantly, still stewing with anger, he obeyed, kneeling by the body.
The forty-second path. Teleportation. He could see the destination in his mind’s eye, like an annoying spot of light in the center of his vision, gradually getting more detailed and focused. Each person that joined his side to assist sped the process along.
The wounded hero flickered and disappeared.
By the time they were done, all three bodies had been removed.
“Qiān chū.” Three ordered.
They moved out.
As they traveled, he could see the streets choked with evacuees, a virtual tide of people, rickshaws, bicycles and cars. They’d reached bottlenecks, points where they couldn’t advance, and the evacuation wasn’t proceeding.
Was this an extension of Behemoth’s strategy? The major streets were unused, either because the Endbringer could see them, unleashing waves of electricity and shockwaves to strike down anyone who tried those routes, or because buildings had been felled and they were impassable.
The heroes who weren’t helping with the evacuation were establishing perimeters, staggered lines of defense. Here, Indian capes were setting up turrets on high ground, guns the size of cars, drilling them into the roads and rooftops. Another block over, there were civilians who weren’t running. They’d gathered, and were talking in low voices. They radiated a different degree of power, on par with the capes on the rooftops.
The Yàngb�
�n squadron slowed down as the cluster of capes grew denser, the buildings more solid and further apart. There were trees here, but the heroes were cutting them down. Each squad seemed to be executing a different plan, a different setup. What appeared to be force-field fences were being erected in between each group and Behemoth’s estimated point of approach.
There was one group with heavy ranged weapons. An area was being cleared, set up with devices. Another area had been marked off with chalk, but it wasn’t clear what they intended to do. Tinkers everywhere were setting up. A kid with red armor and lenses had two odd-looking cannons set up on one rooftop, each the size of a city bus.
It painted a picture, formed a script of sorts, for the story that had yet to take place. The idea that Behemoth would change direction from where he’d initially started off wasn’t even a consideration. They weren’t consolidating forces, gathering together for one good strike, but were arranging it so one would follow after the other. The capes he’d already seen were the ones that had gone forward to support, to find the injured, trusting to mobility or evasion to slip away.
And here, this far in, a dozen countermeasures were being set up, if not two dozen. This would be the staging ground, without the crush of flammable buildings all around them. Each countermeasure would occupy Behemoth for just long enough that the heroes could manage a barrage of attacks.
The Yàngbǎn reached the center of the network, landing on the rooftop with the most capes. The makeshift command center.
He only had to take one look, and he knew. Something vital was missing. They had any number of ways to stall, and each one would cost them a little. But for all of that, he couldn’t make out anything that looked like it would end the fight.
Cody could see the heroes react as the Yàngbǎn landed, and he could see the way others looked to one small set of people for cues. The top-level guys, the leadership of the Protectorate.
A a man in gleaming armor extended a hand to Three, who’d stepped away from the group. “We didn’t expect the Yàngbǎn.”
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