Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

He didn’t follow them through the portal, but he did sidestep through dimensions to reach them. I started to mount a defense, and he lashed out. I didn’t have time to react or give a command; I slammed the portals around the capes shut, and I opened another, larger portal, to take in the beam.

  The beam hit the surface of the portal, and only a fraction passed through to strike Scion from behind. Enough to kill someone, enough to kill me, if the beam had happened to touch any of my control portals, but even so, the portal itself took the brunt of the impact.

  Doormaker staggered beside me.

  The portal was wiped out. Without any barrier in the way, the beam radiated forward to wipe Ash Beast, the cape with the pole, Trickster, and Othala from existence.

  I was left with a decision to make, no time to make it.

  Was I going to be moral, or efficient?

  Two capes fell in my awareness. Acidbath was one. Another was a talented shapeshifter who was in bad shape beneath their moldable skin.

  Shapeshifter, I made the call.

  One expendable asset. At my bidding, he strode forward through the portal. The clairvoyant retrieved a tinker device and dropped it through a portal. The shapeshifter caught it.

  Scion pressed the attack, while Glaistig Uaine and her assigned bodyguard managed a fighting retreat to a portal I’d raised behind them. Had to keep Scion in place, buy time.

  I had only a seconds to act, or I’d lose the Faerie Queen. I’d lost good capes already, so very easily. Now I stood to lose more.

  Have to- have to make it worth it.

  Thinking in words was getting harder. Easier to default to thinking in terms of ideas. I wasn’t going to throw away lives for nothing. I wouldn’t ask others to make sacrifices I wouldn’t make, if the roles were reversed.

  Maybe they’d disagree. Maybe they’d tell me they didn’t want to make that choice. But that was our instinctual self-preservation at work. With things at this scale, that kind of thinking was counterintuitive.

  Maybe they’d agree, if I had the time to explain. To sit down with them in their living rooms and discuss the ins and outs of things over tea.

  But I didn’t have the time to ask politely, and too many had already died. Capes and civilians both.

  I’d leave the civilians alone, but it was fitting if I drew on their strength as well.

  Doormaker was capable of opening the doorways at the speed of thought. I had multitasking abilities. I could open them faster. Not one after the other, a thirtieth of a second passing between each, but simultaneous.

  I didn’t target people this time. Portals opened across the sky in that foreign Earth that Scion and the Faerie Queen fought in. As many portals as I could fit in that Earth’s sky.

  Glaistig Uaine ducked back into the portal, and the shapeshifter I’d left on the ground hit the button.

  The portals around Scion slammed shut, and he disappeared from my mind’s eye.

  It left the shapeshifter locked in the same world as Scion.

  An obstacle, a speed bump at best. I was sacrificing lives for that purpose, putting capes in harms way, and leaving that one cape in an isolated world with Scion nearby. I’d decided to spend a life that lacked strength over the life of a monster.

  But that last gesture had bought me time to move the Faerie Queen of the Birdcage to safety.

  It had also stopped Scion in his tracks for a few seconds. If he was focusing on getting out of that universe, on altering his power to decrypt the portals and free himself to move, then he wouldn’t be paying too much attention to the portals I’d opened above him.

  There were perhaps two hundred Earths in easy reach that had military technology worth talking about.

  Two hundred earths with bombs. Every bomb that hadn’t been in some secure housing, every bomb that was small enough to drop through the doorway, to plummet to the ground below Scion.

  Some would be duds, no doubt, missing an integral component that would be put in place before a bombing run. But a handful, I suspected, were bound to be nuclear bombs.

  He hadn’t stepped through into any world I could see. The bombs had struck home.

  My body was shaking. I wanted to sit down, but I couldn’t afford to.

  I was hungry, I realized. Worn out.

  But I had to capitalize on our advantage here. Had to focus on sorting out my army, so this wasn’t for nothing.

  I broke up the Yàngbǎn. Null/Zero could share powers and he could take them away. But managing multiple groups was cutting into every group’s effectiveness. Against Scion, I needed more effective powers than a blending of less effective ones. I set Zero aside, assigning him a group. Autopilot for now, for a later eventuality.

  The tougher capes I had fell into two categories. There were ones who could take the fight to Scion, like Alexandria or the late Ash Beast, and there were ones who couldn’t, like Lung, Menja and Chevalier.

  There was a Vietnamese cape with a tinker ability who I hadn’t assigned to the tinker group. He was like Lab Rat, but simpler in application. Formulas to boost strength and size, turning regular people into hulking monsters.

  I put him to work, dosing capes who weren’t reliant on armor or anything of the sort. I left Chevalier alone, and left the Crawler-Breed hybrid be, but I dosed Lung and Menja.

  I put Legend and the Number Man with the ranged capes.

  Scion emerged, but he didn’t emerge into a world any of my forces occupied.

  He- he lost the scent trail, I thought.

  It didn’t take him long to find it again. He went straight through into the world where I’d stationed Glaistig Uaine.

  I opened portals. Every single ranged cape and every single cape with a gun that was at my disposal opened fire into the portals. The Number Man’s power coordinated their fire.

  I sensed danger from my precogs. I parted the group.

  Scion moved, and he fired a beam, striking down the center of the part.

  Not one of the attacks had hit him. Though I’d been moving them to safety, the beam had taken out nearly thirty capes.

  I counted Lady Photon among the dead, along with Revel.

  As if Taylor Hebert were one of my puppets, distant, fractured and broken, I could sense the sick feeling in her gut. Revel had been someone she’d- someone I cared about. Lady Photon had been a familiar face.

  Let’s go get that- Let’s go get him.

  My voice, but not my own thoughts.

  The Number Man had told me the attacks would hit. That they hadn’t meant it was Scion’s precognitive ability at work. The ability to win, to take the upper hand.

  But there was a reason he couldn’t use it constantly. It cost him something, drained his reserves.

  By all appearances, he’d parried my thrust and struck home… but I’d taken a piece out of him.

  The rationalizing felt thin at best.

  Have to do bett-er.

  Scion was screaming, still. A roar, a kind of fury.

  Tattletale had described him as human. That meant human weaknesses. Weaknesses he hadn’t learned to adapt to. When he got angry, it was the fury of someone who’d never learned to hold back.

  I put targets in front of him, and he took the bait.

  A front line of the hardiest capes, decoys and projections to draw him in. Then, while he was closer, I was free to move in the heavy hitters who weren’t upwardly mobile.

  Lung, hulking out even before his power kicked in. Menja, Chevalier. A dozen capes I didn’t know.

  Had to mix it up. Raw physical strength, then a cape who was strong because of a telekinetic bubble that surrounded them. More raw strength, then explosive power like Hoyden’s.

  Move them in, then move them away. Use their powers and other powers to give them the mobility. I had two capes that could assign danger sense to protect things, alerting them when the subject was in danger, though the two powers were rather different in practice. It was a way around the fact that I couldn’t predict Scion himself, and I made th
e most of it, switching their targets of choice second by second.

  I could feel the fear of the people I was sending into the fray. Hoyden’s fear was like the scared-little-girl fear I’d experienced while concussed, wracked with pain and helpless at Bakuda’s feet.

  But she could hit Scion, and I needed people who could hit him. I needed every iota of strength I could squeeze out of these capes.

  I watched the world through Defiant’s eyes, and I saw the combat analysis program drawing wireframe models over the battlefield, trying to take in all of the details of the capes I was sending into the fight, predicting Scion’s most likely actions.

  I watched with the Number Man.

  I watched with precogs.

  Scion wasn’t inherently predictable, he wasn’t capable of being read, but I needed some cue that would let me guess what he’d do next.

  Telekinetics stood by portals. The Blue Woman and Parian were among them. When I saw opportunities, I used them to move capes further, faster, to get them out of the way.

  Scion’s rage was reaching a crescendo. The screaming was increasing in volume and intensity, the movements more aggressive, the attacks broader, less focused. A fist flew past Chevalier, followed by a blast that might have wiped out a neighborhood, if the capes had been in a city. He was grazing capes, failing to land a single heavy blow, and it was pissing him off.

  It didn’t help that we were hurting him. He could adapt, but he couldn’t adapt when the same attack wasn’t used twice in a row. It put him on the defensive, keeping him on his toes, and every attempt he made to strike back failed to do more than clip people, injure and wound.

  I knew it was coming. Retaliation. Even before the precogs gave me any forewarning, I was moving to react. Portals opened wider, telekinesis pulling the attacking capes through if they couldn’t move fast enough. Forcefields and other measures flew up to surround Scion, mitigating the damage.

  He radiated light, and the light that escaped the barriers seared and melted the flesh of the offensive capes, as well as the telekinetics and defensive capes who happened to be standing in the wrong place. Translucent and transparent forcefields didn’t even slow the light down.

  I began shutting the doors. Alexandria and various projections flew in to take Scion on. Ursa Aurora, expendable duplicates… just needed a second.

  So much pain. I could tell how much damage that had been done even before I did any headcounts. People were suffering, and so long as they were under my control, they were helpless to express the fear and agony they felt.

  Instead, they were quietly stoic as their wounds wept fluids and burned with traces of the golden light. I put the few healers I had to work.

  They hadn’t even started when Scion used the real attack. I could see him move through Alexandria’s eyes. Through Pretender’s eyes, rather. Arms flew out to the sides, and then he clapped.

  I only managed to shut Alexandria’s portal a fraction of a second before his hands made contact.

  One strike of palm against palm, and the shockwave swept past us as if in slow motion, moving past every portal in the area that was still open. It passed through flesh, and it stilled.

  It was the same effect he’d used to quiet Leviathan’s waves, the same effect that had frozen floodwaters in their tracks and the same ability that had given him so much presence.

  Objects in motion stopped. Portals winked out, warm things plummeted in temperature, cell and neural activity was interrupted. Blood stopped in people’s veins.

  Every cape that had been touched by this stillness dropped to the ground, lifeless.

  I could feel the horror that was experienced by the bystanders. I knew that, given the choice, most would be running.

  But there was no reaction. Each and every one of them was grim, resolute, taking care of their injuries, getting to people who could tend to them or helping others.

  Rank and file, a dozen capes with electricity powers entered the area with the capes who’d succumbed to the stillness.

  They’d stopped, and an object at rest remained at rest. I just- I needed to get them moving again.

  A jolt, the electricity controlled by the capes in question.

  Nothing.

  I pulled Bonesaw away from the tinker group. I couldn’t devote the focus necessary to use her power in any detail. I could have left her on autopilot, but I wasn’t sure that was much better.

  I revoked my control over her, leaving in in the middle of the room with the capes Scion had stopped.

  Then I turned my attention back to Scion.

  I couldn’t dwell. Couldn’t let him turn the tables and put me on the defensive.

  He was tearing into Alexandria. Literally. But she doggedly held on, delivering one crushing blow for every pound of flesh Scion ripped from her midsection. He was roaring as he did it, teeth bared, face contorted.

  The nature of his attack, the stilling, it didn’t fit. Not in tune with the anger.

  It had been another use of his ‘automatic victory’ power. Looking to the future, seeing how he could do the most damage, then following through. A feint, followed by the critical blow.

  The good news was that it meant I was getting the upper hand, forcing him to take a shortcut to get out of it.

  The bad news was that I was almost positive I couldn’t win if things continued in this vein. My precogs weren’t countering his precognition, and he was blocking all direct views of him, forcing me to emphasize indirect predictions where I focused on the damage he was doing and the people he was threatening to kill.

  With each exchange, he was doing too much damage to our side. If I had five times the capes, if we’d been working together like this from the beginning, then maybe. But not like this.

  Same strat- strat- same tactic as before, just to buy myself a little time to think.

  My telekinetics, injured or otherwise, worked their magic through the portals I opened, this time focusing on the munitions that weren’t easily accessible. I moved ICBMs through a spatial-warping ‘lens’ that let it fit through a doorway, unloaded crates of grenades and TNT with telekinesis, and I watched it rain.

  The explosives were halfway to ground when I had Alexandria use another dimension switch to force the portals closed.

  I needed to consolidate my strength. I had capes gathering materials. Moord Nag was among them, one of the scariest warlords of Africa, now traveling between dimensions to scavenge from the dead, her pet shadow devouring mountains of flesh from mass graves and battlefields, swelling in size.

  Lung was shrinking, keying down after I’d pulled him away from Scion, but he still had the raw strength from the dose of distilled brawn I’d given him.

  Coordinate, I thought.

  I couldn’t be moving capes with telekinesis. There had to be other assets.

  Sifara. A chief member of the Thanda. I’d taken to thinking of him as ‘Orbit’.

  But Orbit wasn’t quite it.

  His power required him to have a strong reference for those he worked it on. Eyesight alone didn’t work so well, because eyesight was faulty. His preference, for a strong connection, was to touch individuals. Failing that, he worked by eyesight alone.

  I didn’t need to go that far. I could see through a hundred pairs of eyes at this location alone.

  A cape formed a ball out of stone. Roughly the size of a tennis ball.

  One by one, Sifara connected the capes around us to the ball.

  Sifara’s power maintained spatial relationships. He moved the ball, and every cape he’d connected to the ball moved a corresponding amount. When he turned the ball, the connected capes rotated around the ball by equal degree.

  We’d used it against Khonsu in our first fight, anchoring ourselves to him so he couldn’t teleport away without bringing us with him.

  Now we were going to use it for the opposite intent.

  Labyrinth and Scrub, the same pair that had made the portal in Earth Gimel, made more portals. The dimension switches w
ouldn’t work forever, and I’d pretty much but there were options for future attacks. There were more explosives, but nothing big.

  I needed a focus, a weak point I could capitalize on. To those ends, I needed to buy time to work and I needed to bait him into getting angry.

  Between them, Labyrinth and Scrub began making paths to other worlds. I watched as they paged through the available options.

  Scion emerged from the other world, having broken down the barrier we’d set. Fragments of Alexandria’s body tumbled to the ground, more like a statue than flesh. He had to flex his hand and use his power to free it of the left side of her skull.

  He’d suffered for a few of the big hits we’d delivered. His flesh remained pristine, golden, but there were folds and scraps here and there where his damaged flesh had been stripped away and remained in place around the creases of his body after the replacement flesh had come in.

  He came out swinging, obliterating two continents on two different worlds before he found us.

  One rotation of Sifara’s ball, a row of doorways, and the capes were pulled backwards through the portals, which closed promptly after them.

  The debris hadn’t even settled when I had Sifara move the ball again, erecting more portals to send my capes into the battlefield. Brute force, capes who could tie him down, capes who could take a hit or two. I kept Lung in the fight, holding him back for later, when he’d be exponentially stronger.

  As strategies went, it would hold for at least a little while. Scion’s patience seemed to be getting shorter and shorter, and I was on guard for the next retaliatory strike.

  My heart was pounding, my mouth dry. This was looking grim, each exchange hurting my side more than it hurt Scion. Was there an out? A chink in the armor?

  I’d collected all of the tinkers in one place and I’d put them on autopilot, a vague, nebulous goal in mind. To get them working together, I’d used Zero of the Yàngbǎn to tie them together as a group, splitting their powers.

  A few hundred tinkers, each with a mix of tinker powers, all working on a singular project.

  I could sense it, using the Clairvoyant and Doormaker both, using Labyrinth and Scrub. The solid space between worlds. A space that Scion had altered somehow, blocking off.