58

Exsanguination 5

What the hell was this stupid patient doing biting me? It didn't even hurt because of the armour I used to cover my arm, but it just pissed me off that he could be so stupid! I was trying to help him!

I punched him in the face. I was just overcome with some uncontrollable anger. He deserved to die for being such an ungrateful asshole.

Then another patient tackled me from behind. I had to use the bots in my costume to boost my strength to get out of the hold, and I ended up elbowing him in the ribs hard enough to crack something.

I formed Abyssal to defend me, in order to kill these idiots!

Wait, what am I thinking?

I'm not acting normal!

My aggression centers are spiking like crazy, I informed myself. Hundreds – no, thousands of copies of my brain were all analyzing each other, and they were finding discrepancies. While each of my brains had tiny differences, I usually agreed with myself. This time, a small minority of about ten brains, especially my natural wet and squishy brain, was acting very strangely.

Master. I was being Mastered. I was prepared for this; I just didn't realize it could hit me so seamlessly or so quickly. At least Vicky's aura was short range and it felt obvious when it hit me. This Master was definitely stronger yet subtler.

At least I understood what was happening. Realizing what was happening was the first step to fixing it. And I knew, academically, how to do it, even though I had never actually done it for real. It was only something I had theorized was possible, but I never took the step to actually do it. After all, if I was hesitant to do it to myself, there was no way I could get oversight and volunteers for it. But right now it was necessary, lest I completely lose my mind.

While I had let my other brains actually do work before, especially while my biological body was asleep, I had never given up control of my actual body. Not that I didn't trust… myself. But this was a step I never really thought I had to take.

I gave up control of my body, and my brain, to my other brains. I let the majority decide what was normal. Good thing there was 99.99% agreement, and all the brains that were acting weird were in the same general location. I was certain that my biological brain was going nuts. I toned down the anger and aggression, blocked some of the signals from certain areas of my brain. Just to be safe, I essentially paralyzed myself and let my other bots intercept all the signals going out to my limbs.

My body fell limp, but only for a split second. My other brains picked up the slack instantly. It felt odd to have use different brains twenty miles away interpret my sense of balance, another set fifteen miles in the other directions controlling my legs, and so on. Weird didn't begin to cover it. I simultaneously felt more numb and more consciously aware of my own body than ever before.

Once I got myself under control, I was finally able to get a proper assessment of what was happening around me. "Total chaos" was one way to describe it, but more accurately it was clear that foreign emotions were ripping through everyone here. Nervousness and fear were just not present, even though everyone had every reason to be afraid. Even patients I had worked with that I knew were timid were now acting like berserkers.

People were beating each other to death. And biting or scratching, too. Even the feeble and tired ones were fighting with all their strength. People grabbed anything that was in reach, throwing, swinging, and stabbing makeshift weapons at each other. But many of the uninjured survivors were absolutely rampaging. Some of the police officers had pulled their sidearms and started shooting. I even felt a bullet ping off my personal layer of armour.

At least they were the easiest to deal with, as were any other non-Brutes. One of the local heroes, New Hotness, was some kind of combat Thinker/Mover. He could dodge bullets, but they couldn't dodge a swarm of bots. The defensive Tinker? He had a strong suit of armour but it left enough gaps to squeeze bots inside. Same with people holding guns. They were deadly, but easy to take down. I immediately pulled as many bots as I could into the area to restrain everyone, then knocked them out the way I usually did.

But the Wards, Laserdream and Shielder… well, they were, shall we say, more effective. Laserdream was practically a disco ball raining down lasers of mass destruction. Kid Win's blaster pistols, for one, were designed to be non-lethal, but not when he tuned them up to anti-Brute settings and used it on normal people. Concussive blasts that should have just knocked people back were shattering ribs.

Clockblocker was thankfully less destructive. Even though his power had the potential to be deadly, it required setting traps with thin materials like paper or hair, then luring people into those traps. The rage that was afflicting everyone meant he wasn't doing much detailed planning. Instead they were simply lashing out instinctively at whatever was in reach. He did use his power to freeze people or their clothing, but generally ended up just punching his trapped victims.

Vista was outright deadly, though. She had never been a front-line fighter, and for the most part her power was usually used to trap villains or speed up movement. Now, though? Space warped and bent to degrees I didn't know she could cause. People running at her somehow ended up running up the side of the hospital wall. A second later they were falling to the ground as space snapped back to normal. Others who got too close to hitting her ended up breaking their knuckles on steel or concrete.

I didn't just knock out the heroes right away because I had no desire to deal with the Slaughterhouse Nine alone. I had a different option to deal with them that didn't leave them lying helplessly on the street. It was time to put my anti-Master experiment to work. Earlier than I thought it was necessary. I just hoped I had prepared enough.

With my teammates, the Wards, and others who had volunteered for my experiment, I began to compare their current brains to my copies. I still wasn't sure if they were exactly right, having so little time to get things working. They didn't have the advantage I had of thousands of copies, checking and verifying each other. I only had one shot for each of them.

I started using my bots to clamp down and "correct" the thoughts of the others, based on what my model brains were telling me. Calming them down was technically the easy part. I was just hoping that I wasn't altering their personality or messing up their memories in the process. Even worse was the fact that I couldn't exactly fix them in real time. I wasn't fast enough to intercept every bit of input, check them with my simulated brains, then adjust some of their neural responses afterwards. So many of their unconscious and reflexive actions still under the influence of the Master, but at least I was able to adjust their more long-term and conscious decision making.

At the very least, none of them were actively trying to kill more people, so that was a win.

While the fighting had stopped, people were still in danger while lying on the ground unconscious. Fires were burning and buildings could still collapse on them. I couldn't just leave them lying there. I let them wake up naturally, but I still had to use my bots to tone down their adrenaline and aggression anyway. The Master was still affecting them while they were knocked out. It wasn't a perfect fix, something more akin to giving them a bout of depression. It was the best I could do as a generalized fix. The people weren't back to normal, but at least it was a non-aggressive abnormal rather than murderous abnormal. Some ended up lethargic if I overdid it. Others had also lost their sense of fear, which meant they had nearly lost their sense of self-preservation.

At least the fighting wasn't restarting. Kid Win wasn't shooting people down, Vista wasn't sending people flying or falling through the air. But even a minute of chaos with parahuman powers in the mix? There was going to be a lot of broken bones to heal. And those who couldn't heal… well, there were a lot of bodies to clean up.

This was taking most of my concentration. I was essentially Mastering myself, as well as Shielder, Laserdream, Kid Win, Vista, and a few local heroes like Banderas and New Hotness. I wasn't that kind of Master, and it took conscious effort to stimulate or dampen neural signals in their brains manually. I was just glad that Glory Girl and the others weren't back yet, and still taking a breather after running from the Siberian. If the rest of them had been here, it really would have strained all the concentration of all the brains in my network.

For the people I didn't have bots in their brains, the best I could do was restrain them or knock them out. At least that didn't take a whole lot of concentration, but I never actually had to do that for several hundred people simultaneously.

Who was the damn master? I needed to shut them down, but I was so busy trying to fix everything I barely had enough focus left to actually seek them out. I knew they had probably travelled with Bonesaw for a while, but then split off before Bonesaw reached the children's hospital. That meant they had probably come in with the last group of survivors, which at least narrowed it down to about a group of ten…

I tried to track down each one of them, focus on where they had gone, if any had suspiciously gone into hiding or something. Turned out, I didn't have to.

"So, Jack, what do you think?" a girl said loudly and confidently. "I'm way better than little miss matchstick, aren't I?."

Wait… Jack? Why did I stop keeping track of Jack Slash? The Master taking control of my mind for a few seconds had disrupted my train of thought, as well as everyone else going nuts. But even then I should have spared a few brains to keep an eye on him. Heck, even before that, I probably should have taken him down. I had stupidly thought he had some kind of invincibility power and given up right away, instead of recognizing the Siberian's power. After seeing her use it on Bonesaw, it was obvious, but I should have known that nobody in the past decade had ever reported Jack with a Brute rating of any kind. In fact, just about every decision regarding Jack Slash, I seemed to have made the wrong one.

Well, not any more. He was here, and he was going to die by my –

And then I got blindsided by a monster the size of a truck.

First I hadn't focused on Jack enough, now I had focused on him too much. What the hell was wrong with me? Thankfully, my near-permanent coating of nanobots around my body had managed to protect me enough as I was sent rolling down the street.

"WHERE IS SHE?" the monster girl screamed. "WHERE'S THE HEALER?"

She was focused on me.

"YOU! NEW WAVE HEALER!"

Did she want me to heal her? How the hell did she expect that? Unless she just wanted me to fix her brain, but that was kind of hard when she looked like she was going to trample and kill me. As she approached me, I backpedaled and then ran. I placed a copy of Abyssal between us, then ran away from her.

While the half-girl at the top of the monster seemed to be focus on me, her lower half seemed to be more interested in the unconscious people on the ground. Even as she rushed towards me, the mish-mash of mouths and limbs snatched at them, eating them up like easy meals. She seemed momentarily distracted by all the "food" available to her.

In trying to stop people from killing each other, I had just made easier targets for the killers to finish them off instead. But if they woke up, they'd probably start just killing each other again anyway. I could tell that the Master was still trying to get me and others to kill each other. I needed to keep the others awake and "corrected" to help fight the Slaughterhouse members.

At least the Master had identified herself. I rushed my bots towards her to take her out. If I could stop her, I could free up a ton of my concentration and focus on the actual fight. Not that the I could really guarantee that anyone else would help me, though.

The others whose emotions I had been "correcting" were still coming to terms with what they had done. Vista was especially horrified at her own effectiveness. Kid Win was trying to convince himself that he had simply made a mistake. I guess I could try to dull their natural emotions as well so they wouldn't go crazy, but at some point I was going to be crossing a few lines – namely, from anti-Mastering to Mastering them.

And maybe I had cut down their aggression too much. I hadn't known them long enough, and my models weren't perfect. Maybe they should have more adrenaline in their system, especially with the Slaughterhouse Nine right here. But how much was because of the Master, and how much was simply me being incorrect with my estimates?

Focus, damn it! I told myself. I had to take out the Master! Taking her out would solve the whole issue.

I sent a wave of bots towards the girl that was still trying to get friendly with Jack Slash. Maybe Jack had a longer record of killing, but this girl was the one doing more harm right now. One Abyssal's worth of bots crashed into the girl. Jack Slash seemed to have anticipated me somehow, and leaped away before my bots could have been visible to the naked eye. He took shelter behind Crawler.

The girl didn't stand a chance; she had no Brute rating at all. Crawler, on the other hand… well, it wasn't even his Brute powers that were stopping me, it was the acid he was spitting. It was so powerful it dissolved any of my bots that were near him… as well as the asphalt below.

I could feel influence on my own brain lessen, as well as all the others whose brain I was watching over. Good. But it didn't disappear completely, even though I was sure the Master herself was unconscious. Or dead soon, if Crawler kept moving ahead while secreting acid all over the place. It probably took time to fade away completely.

Meanwhile, Crawler was rushing towards me. Or Abyssal, more accurately. Abyssal was the biggest "cape" around, and while I was planning to use him to defend me against Noelle… Crawler had other ideas.

"ARE YOU STRONG? FIGHT ME! HURT ME!" The insectoid giant shouted gleefully.

I had Abyssal backpedal as well. I already knew his acids could dissolve my bots, and I wasn't going to sacrifice half a ton of bots. I was pretty short already.

"NO! MINE! GET OVER HERE, I WANT THE HEALER!" Noelle shouted. She shoved Crawler out of the way. The two of them were racing each other to get to me.

"NO FAIR, I SAW HIM FIRST!" Crawler whined.

I ran, getting as far from the huge monsters as fast as I could. Two giant deadly monsters wasn't hard to keep track of, but she apparently had allies as well. Deformed, mutated capes that followed or rode on her back. I stumbled, and suddenly found myself teleported fifty yards further back than where I had fallen. Right next to Noelle.

One of Noelle's mouths managed to grab me, and it would have bitten off my arm if I hadn't hardened the bots in my costume into solid armor. Even so, the mouth managed to crush through my armor. It was painful, and I wasn't sure if the pressure was breaking my bones. My blood flow was definitely cut off and I lost feeling in my fingers.

I used Abyssal to try to cut me free. Her body was even about as tough as I thought, for a monster that could body-check the acid-coated Crawler without issue. It was tougher than any natural skin or bone. In fact, it was probably bulletproof, tougher than reinforced Kevlar. My bots could get through it, but it took effort and time. When a monster was trying to eat me by the arm, I tended to be impatient.

I tried other ways of freeing myself. Some bots I pushed inside the monster's mouth, to wrench it open wider. Some of the ones along my arm I turned them into tiny bearings, so it could lubricate the way out and let my arm slip free. As I pulled, I felt like I was tearing my arm in half. I pushed against the monster with my hands and feet against the body in my attempt to free myself, but that didn't work well either. The body was covered in so many mouths that I had to fend off other mouths no matter where I placed my feet.

Just as I managed to free my arm, it got my left leg instead.

Even with my bots forming armour, the mouths managed to get me. This other mouth was even stronger than the one that had my arm, larger and with sharper teeth. I could already feel it dig into my calf muscle and crush my tibia. My arm was useless; now that it was free I could tell it was bending where it shouldn't. The mouth that was eating my leg also got me in an awkward position, there was no leverage for me to push away from it even if I could wrench that mouth open.

I wasn't getting free. The other mouths that were being blocked by my bots had no issue taking bites of my bots as well, swallowing them by the mouthful. I'd run out of bots before I could pull myself free, and the other mouths would rip me apart limb from limb.

There was only one thing I could do.

I grit my teeth, used my bots to seal off my blood vessels from the inside, and numb my own nerves. I had my bots cut my own leg free. As I sliced through the flesh and bone, I used my other leg to kick myself away.

I fell away from Noelle, just out of range of her many mouths, and used Abyssal to carry me somewhere safer. I needed to tend to my stump of a leg, make sure it didn't get infected, and hide from the damn monster all at the same time. I was feeling lightheaded, with adrenaline being the only thing that was keeping me going now.

While I was tending to my arm and stump of a leg, the heroes had also managed to reorient themselves to defend whoever was still alive. Laserdream had taken to the skies to rain light beams down on the monsters. Crawler utterly ignored her, but she managed to score some hits on some of the clones that were trying to protect Noelle. One of the clones had the power to swap her with a broken down motorcycle. She was disoriented as she appeared on the ground near Crawler, but she managed to fly out of his reach quickly enough.

Meanwhile, Clockblocker and Vista were working together with well-practiced efficiency. Clockblocker froze small objects at shoulder height with Vista's help, in Crawler's path. The huge monster just crashed straight through the things. His own strength caused him to tear straight through the things, which did substantial damage to his body. But it didn't kill him.

"HAHAHA! IT HURTS! HURT ME MORE! MORE!" he screamed out as he turned his attention to the two Wards.

Shielder flew to help them, mostly to prevent Crawler's acid spray from landing on them. In fact, Crawler was drawing nearly everyone's attention, including the local Tinker. And the local combat Thinker was mostly trying to find ways to run away.

I was mostly on my own, Noelle was the only one focused on me. Everyone else was trying to survive Crawler. At least her clones didn't have the same level of Brute toughness or regeneration that Noelle herself had. That meant my bots could take all of them out without too much trouble.

All except one.

When Abyssal approached the newest clone that Noelle spat out, he… I… my bots… paused.

My bots weren't listening to me.

I was losing control. Wait, not really, not a loss. A fight for control. One of my brains was disagreeing with the rest. Wait, no, not one of my brains. A whole new brain had somehow connected to my network…

Emma was right, Taylor. You're really fucking pathetic. You never even fought back, you're just making excuses for yourself. Let me show you what you should've done from the beginning.

My own bots were turning against me. It was such a shock to my system. For the longest time, I was used to hearing my own thoughts. Thousands of different thoughts, but all mine. But now, there was an invader. Someone controlling my network and it wasn't me.

I knew it was the clone. But why could she take my stuff?

I felt a sharp lance of anger that was almost physically painful. I had built all this up. I had built everything up from nothing. I went from scavenging garbage to saving Dragon's life. I had gone from bullied to taking on Endbringers. Like hell if this… cheap copy could just take everything that was mine.

But she had. She had stolen one of my brains already. And through that brain I could sense her thoughts. And I knew she could sense mine. She was manipulating those brains, changing them. It was cliché, but it was making them… evil. That is, more sociopathic. I understood those parts of the brain. She was shutting down empathy centers, manipulating other pathways. Cold, uncaring, selfish decisions dominated. More like her brain, presumably.

I could sense her trying to take over me. The bots that were within my own body, reinforcing my skin and skeleton, and speeding up my thought processes. If she took over those, I would be dead in an instant. I didn't let her, and turned all my focus into making sure I was safe from my own bots.

She took that change in my concentration to nab a bit more control of some more bots, and another brain. Fuck! I couldn't use the same trick she was using on me back at her, simply because she didn't have any bots inside her body. Even worse, it was easier for a bot to do random damage instead of being under careful control, so it was easier for her to mess up my stuff than it was for me to hold on to things carefully.

I needed to kill her, quickly. But she, like, me, was keeping a firmer control over the bots that were near her own body, so I couldn't just send bots at her. It would only be handing her more to work with.

Even worse, it wasn't just me that she was trying to kill. All the people I had been trying to save, all the patients, and even the volunteers whose brains I had extensively copied... she was trying to wrest control over those bots and kill them all.

They're just resources to be harvested. It's not like they even appreciate what you do, I could hear her thoughts echoing through my network. She had subverted a few brains. Several brains that were agreeing, and controlling bots to simply kill the people I had merely knocked unconscious.

Like myself, the other parahumans with bots inside their bodies could have died instantly if she took control. I needed them alive, if only to fight the Slaughterhouse Nine. Even turning more of my mind onto securing their safety, it meant I was losing some control over other parts. Like the other patients.

Now who's the one that's cold and selfish?

Fuck. You.

But in each person I wasn't concentrating on saving, she unleashed my bots in their full lethality. All the patients that were closest to her died instantly as my bots shredded every organ simultaneously. I tried to limit her control, but with so many people together in a tight space, and my focus on trying to keep myself and other capes alive… even a little slip had cost hundreds of lives.

But it would get even worse if her sphere of influence expanded. I had to focus on locking her down. She had already subverted three of my brains, and that was too much already. Of the brains she had taken over, I lost control over all the loose bots in that brain's region. I couldn't let take any more of my network, or gain control over more geographical area. Used the last of my concentration to prevent her from nabbing any more.

She could sense what I was doing. And I could sense what she was doing in response. All the people she killed, she immediately began breaking down their bodies, using the bots inside to make more bots of her own. Of her own design.

See? You could have built up so many more if you weren't so picky with your resources.

I had to take her out before this got out of control. Before she could turn too many of my own bots against me. But I couldn't just send bots at her like I had against most of my other opponents. I looked around. What did I have around me that I could use? Rocks? Dirt? Broken glass? I didn't have anything useful enough to take her out.

It won't work, anyway. I know what you're thinking.

And I knew what she was thinking. She retreated behind the safety of her creator. Noelle was still advancing, and I had to run away from her again. Crawler was getting bored of the others and started coming after me. It was only because the two didn't have any coordination that I didn't end up trapped as I ran.

"WHERE'S THE HEALER? I WANT THE HEALER!"

"You want her? I know where she is. That way," evil-Taylor told her. She was pointing straight to where Panacea, and the rest of the team, were. They were miles away, still tired from fighting Bonesaw and the Siberian, and they had no idea she was coming.

She collected the bots and brains she had stolen, and they were off. I had to go after her, but my own mind's concentration was wavering, trying to maintain control while staving off the pain and blood loss of my broken arm and missing leg.

Author's Notes:

- man, I waffled a lot on how this chapter should go. Had ideas that would cause me to have to rewrite the entire next arc, but... I thought the changes would be for the better. Hopefully.