She stared across the room at Accord and Chevalier’s bodies, straining to see if either were breathing.
She managed the only utterance she could, without the ability to bring air from her lungs to her mouth: A click of her tongue. “Tsk.”
Arc 24: Crushed
24.01
Couldn’t catch up, not with the Undersiders mounted and us on foot. I could fly, but I couldn’t abandon this team. If Tecton hadn’t deferred leadership to me, I might have taken on a scouting role, flying ahead, notifying the Undersiders.
This was the worst environment for me. There were bugs aplenty, but the area was thick with smoke, and there were fires everywhere.
Bugs weren’t going to contribute much. They were getting roasted, by hot air and scorching smoke if not the fires themselves..
I flew from point to point. Navigation wasn’t my strong point, so I focused on moving in straight lines, stopping at various vantage points where I was fairly confident I was out of Behemoth’s sight, physically reorienting myself, then flying to another point.
Each time I stopped, I took a second to try to grasp the situation. The streets were flooded with people, and it was only getting worse. The troops we had on the ground were struggling to make headway, and from my vantage point, I could tell that things were getting worse.
The approach had an added advantage in that it let me track where the fires were. I collected bugs, took a moment here and there to analyze them, assess their capabilities, and guided them along my general route, keeping them as safe as I could manage.
There was a crash as a building toppled, sparks spilling out into the air. I could hear screams, distant, as the crowd recoiled. Through the bugs in their midst, I could sense the way they were scrambling for cover, for safety. The nearest path that took them away from Behemoth was towards us.
Rickshaws turned around and made their way for the mouth of the narrow street, people pushed and shoved, and otherwise stampeded towards us.
I was in the clear, but my team… I flew a short distance away to check everything was clear, then started to make my way back, still flying in short bursts.
Flitting here and there, I thought.
No, I thought, banishing the idea from my head. Not flitting. Never let that word slip in conversation. Makes me think of fairies. It’ll make Glenn think of fairies.
“Tecton!” I called out, as I returned to my roost.
He looked up at me. Even with his heavy body armor, he was struggling with the mass of people who were pushing and squeezing their way past him.
I pointed, “Go through the building! ASAP!”
He looked at the building, then raised his gauntlets. The piledrivers slammed into the wall, punching out a rough, door-shaped hole.
He strode through, then did the same for another exterior wall. The Chicago Wards flowed through.
“Not used to being allowed to make messes,” he said, his voice loud. “This is just about the second time I can go all out!”
“Powers,” I said, flying down to ground level. The smoke wasn’t as bad down here. “You’ve had a few minutes to think, rookies, give me a quick rundown.”
“To think?” Cuff asked me. “The hell? You can think with all this going on?”
“You’re clear of the crowd,” I said. The number of people here were only half that on the other street. It was a herd mentality, lemming mentality. They were too focused on getting away.
“It’s not just the crowd. It’s-” she flinched as lightning struck somewhere in the distance. “We could die any second, just like that.”
She was showing it the most, but I could see the fear in the other two, as well. In everyone, but these guys in particular.
They’re new. They’ve probably never been in a real life or death fight, let alone something like this.
Hell, I’ve never been in a fight quite like this.
It was ominous, the fact that the armbands were silent. The A.I. wasn’t counting off a death toll, and I doubted it was because nobody with an armband was dying. Maybe Chevalier had made a call, deciding that morale was low enough without an artificial voice reading out the names of the dead.
The only noises were the impacts and rumbles of Behemoth’s fighting against defending capes, the screaming and panting of people who ran past us, and the incessant crackle of nearby fires and crashes of thunder.
“We stand better odds if you pull yourselves together, fill us in, so we can use each other’s abilities to help,” I said. “Come on guys, work with me.”
“I’m a breaker and shaker,” Annex told me, “Merge into nonliving material, warp space.”
“Warp it how?” I asked.
“Reshape it,” he said. He was still half-walking, half-jogging, but he stretched a white-gloved hand out four feet, touching a sign. His hand smeared against it as though it were more liquid than solid, coloring it the same white as his glove. The sign oozed back into the wall, virtually disappearing, and Annex removed his hand, slowly reeling in the extended flesh. The sign remained where it was, compressed against the wall, the surface flat.
“Okay,” I said, making a mental note. “Okay, good.”
“While in there, I’m about as tough as whatever it is I’m controlling,” he added.
“Alright. Golem?”
Golem had to stop running to demonstrate. He dropped to one knee and plunged a hand into the street.
Ahead of us, there was a crash, a grinding noise. A hand made of pavement was reaching out of the ground, five feet long from the base of the wrist to the tip of the middle finger. The fingers seemed to move in slow motion as the hand pushed against stopped cars that were sort of in our way, shoving them to one side of the road.
The hand submerged back into the road as he withdrew his own hand from the street.
“Okay,” I said. There’s synergy with Annex. Maybe Tecton too. “Anything I need to know? Limitations?”
“Whatever I use my hand on, has to match the exit point, pretty much. Asphalt for asphalt, metal for metal, wood for wood.”
I nodded.
“Bigger the thing I’m making, slower it comes out, slower it moves when I try to use my fingers.”
“Anything else?”
“Lots more, but mainly I can only use my hands, arms, feet and legs. My face, but that’s not too useful.”
Cuff made a small noise as something crashed in the distance.
“Cuff?” I asked. She didn’t reply.
“Cuff!” Tecton raised his voice. It seemed to wake her up.
“What?” she asked.
“Your powers. Explain.”
She shook her head, “Um. The, uh-”
When she didn’t pull herself together enough to reply, Tecton set a heavily armored hand on her shoulder, “She’s a metallokinetic. Shape and move metal, short-range, including the stuff she’s wearing. Some enhanced strength and durability, too.”
“Yeah,” Cuff said, her voice quiet. “Not half as cool as those guys.”
“It’s good,” I said. I noted how she’d paired up with Grace. Did Cuff’s presence have anything to do with the fact that Grace was wearing PRT-issue chainmail? They didn’t give me the vibe that they were a pair in any friendship or romantic sense, but they were two bruisers, two girls in a group of mostly boys, and they were sticking together. That seemed to be enough.
I was going to say something more, but a crash and the rumble of something falling down nearby stalled that train of thoughts.
“Oh fuck,” Cuff said under her breath, as lightning struck close by. She was panting, and I suspected it wasn’t the exertion. “Oh hell. Why did I wear a costume made of metal? I’m a walking lightning rod.”
“You’ve got a regulation suit between the metal and your skin, right?” Tecton asked. “If it’s a type three or type four-”
“No suit,” Cuff said. She tapped the metal at her collarbone, “Strongest if metal’s in direct contact with my skin. Got a layer that’s almost li
quid between this and me.”
“You didn’t think to change?” he asked.
“I didn’t think,” she said, her voice quiet, harboring a tremor.
Why the hell did she come, if she was going to be like this?
“Fuck,” Wanton said, “You are a lightning rod.”
“I don’t think you’re any safer or worse off than anyone else,” I said, trying to inject a note of confidence into the discussion. I raised myself a step off the ground to get a better view of what lay ahead. The ground was shaking, a steady, perpetual tremor. “His lightning doesn’t follow regular channels. We’re all lightning rods to him.”
Cuff didn’t respond. I glanced down to see her frowning.
“Not reassuring,” Wanton said.
“It’s the truth,” I said. “We accept it, take it in stride and use it. Can we change that fact? Or use it to our benefit?”
“He’ll zap us to death with one hit, even if we protect ourselves,” Wanton said. “Yeah. There’s a benefit there.”
These guys aren’t the Undersiders. Different strengths, different weaknesses. The Undersiders were good at approaching things from an oblique angle, at catching people off guard, being reckless, even borderline fatalistic. They had been more experienced than I was when I joined. It was the other way around here. Even Tecton, the oldest member of the group, the official leader, had less experience than I did.
I didn’t know them well enough to be able to guess what they brought to the fight. I considered the various powers as I flew from point to point, scouting with eyes and careful use of my swarm. Didn’t want to let any of the mobile ones get burned up.
The swarm included fruit flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches and house flies, identical or almost identical to the ones back home. Surprising. There were some smaller varieties of cockroach, nearly as numerous as the cockroaches in the peak of Brockton Bay’s worst months, some larger varieties of mosquito, flies I identified as the botflies that had come up in my research, and crickets.
No game changers, but I hadn’t expected any. The spiders were badass here, at least. The silk wasn’t so good, but even so, big spiders.
The Wards, their powers, how to use them? I thought. If I went by the PRT classifications, Tecton was a tinker with shaker capabilities. Wanton was a breaker, someone who altered themselves or their relation to the world by some characteristic of his power, becoming a shaker effect, a telekinetic storm. Annex was the same, only he became a living spacial distortion effect, a living application of Vista’s power. Golem, no doubt a shaker. That left Cuff and Grace. I wasn’t sure how to peg Cuff, until I saw her in action, but she and Grace were both melee fighters in a fashion.
Of the six of them, four were shakers in some respect. The classification included forcefields, effects like Grue’s, and powers that reshaped the battlefield, like Vista’s.
I’d been doing my reading on the PRT’s terminology, among other things.
“Battlefield control,” I said. “You guys have battlefield control.”
“Lots,” Tecton said. “Aimed for it.”
I gave him a curious look, but this wasn’t the time for explanations. I glanced at each of them in turn, so nobody would feel ignored, “We could try to slow him down, but I’m not sure that’s going to do much. Instead, we’re going to meet up with the Undersiders. I think there has to be something we can do with them. Citrine, maybe Grue. They’re versatile, and I’ve worked with them. In the meantime, we’re doing damage control. Seeing what we can do to keep Behemoth-”
Another lightning strike made the ground shake. Cuff shrieked, and I grit my teeth. We barely had two seconds of reprieve between flashes of lightning. They lanced down from the dark clouds of smoke overhead, more red than yellow, and the thunder seemed more intense than it should be. That wasn’t the worrisome part. Behemoth was periodically hitting us with something bigger. Bolts of lightning big enough to erase a small house from the landscape.
“-We’re going to do what we can to keep him from murdering people,” I completed my thought, belatedly.
“Right,” Tecton said.
“You know about earthquakes and architecture, Tecton?”
“Yeah.”
“What can we do about the shockwaves, or whatever else he’s been doing to make the ground shake?”
“I have ideas. Not perfect, won’t hold for long, but ideas.”
“Good. And we were talking about lightning rods,” I said.
“You said they don’t matter.”
“The drones Dragon used redirected his lightning. Golem? How big can you go? Optimal conditions?”
“Depends on the amount of space at the destination. I’d need a big piece of solid material, and I’d need time.”
“We’ll find an opportunity then,” I said. “We’ll figure out a way to make this work.”
The crash of something being knocked or thrown through a building half a block away nearly made me jump out of my skin. The others had ducked for cover, too late to have mattered if it had been real danger.
“Keep moving,” I ordered.
“Three of us are in heavy armor,” Tecton said. “You can’t really run in armor like mine.”
“I get it,” I said, even as I knew the Undersiders were getting further away. “Do the best you can.”
Mobility and transportations were problems. I wondered if there were ways to fix that. Even if we found Rachel and the others, I doubted we could put Tecton on a dog. I couldn’t remember which, but I sort of recalled that Wanton or Grace had been a little shy of the dogs, too, so that option was out.
But if we could make this work…
Most people had evacuated at this point, with only a handful of stragglers occasionally passing us, giving us wary looks.
I drew arrows in the air to direct the remaining civilians away from the stampede of people, putting them on a general route where smoke didn’t seem to be heavy, and where I hadn’t been able to see or sense any fire.
Other heroes were joining the fray. I saw Eidolon pass overhead, surrounded by what looked like a shimmer of heat in the air. A forcefield? Something else entirely? If there were more with him, I couldn’t see them through the smoke.
I resumed my recon, continuing to expand the swarm that was keeping me company. My range was extensive, now, with a radius of maybe one thousand, eight hundred feet. That extended a fraction further as I zig-zagged over the area, picking up more bugs on the fringes and bringing them to me.
I stopped when I saw a short crane, three or four stories tall. I turned around to meet the others, perching on the corner of a rooftop. I pointed the way with ambient bugs, “Tecton, this way. Take a shortcut, right through the building. I don’t want to lose any time if we can help it.”
“Right,” he said.
It took only a minute for them to reach the crane.
“We’ve got two people who can distort metal,” I said. “Annex and Cuff. Maybe Wanton can help too. Tear it down. We’re making our lightning rod.”
“You sure?” Tecton asked. “Because this makes a pretty good lightning rod on its own.”
I glanced nervously over in the direction where the smoke and lightning flashes were most intense. If he shot us, right here, right now, and turned the crane into a tesla tower, this might be my dumbest move yet. I perched on the corner of a building, where I still had a measure of cover, and watched the battle in the distance. I could see Legend’s lasers through the smoke, hundreds at a time, radiating out from one central point, from Legend himself, and then turning sharply in the air to strike Behemoth.
Behemoth was using flame, which was some small reassurance, and he was occupied with the two remaining members of the Triumvirate.
“Yeah. Do it.”
Both Annex and his costume merged into the base of the tower, and gradually climbed up to the point where the upper part still stood. He could only ‘annex’ part of the object at one time, it seemed. No surrounding a whole building. He set abo
ut breaking the bonds, and the crane’s arm began to bend. Cuff caught one end of it, then began heaving it towards the tower’s base. The other half snapped off, and Annex helped guide it down, sliding it against the crane’s shaft.
It was costing us time, this project. I felt impatient, was worried it wouldn’t work, and these would be wasted minutes we could be doing something else.
But they were making it happen, putting the pieces of our project together. Cuff was walking around the crane’s base, effectively melting the metal, or reshaping it so it formed a flattened blob. Annex tore the rest apart, so Cuff had more material to work with.
When Cuff was done, Annex slipped down to the blob and flattened it out further.
“A little thicker,” Golem said.
Annex ‘swam’ around the blob’s perimeter, shifting more material towards the center. Cuff drew a blob of metal out of the pad and shaped it into a disk for Golem.
“A lot of synergy in this team,” I commented.
“Sort of aimed for that,” Tecton said. “They took everyone willing to leave Chicago, to support other cities that lost more members, offered incentives to the rookies if they were willing to move to another city. Your-parents-can-afford-not-to-work-for-a-year kind of incentives. I drafted these guys because I thought their powers would work well together.”
“Drafted?” I asked.
“Yeah. I mean, most teams are lucky if they get a few members with a good interaction, with some more on the fringes that they have to work around and fit into the mix. We had a good setup with Raymancer, before he got too sick to move. A strong, versatile ranged attacker with the rest of us situated to protect him, right?”
I nodded.
“After seeing the Undersiders at work, I started to think we need to be less mix-and-match. Form teams with specific goals in mind. New York sort of does that.”
“I know they have a team of ‘lancers’. Forward vanguard, fast moving.”
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