4.5
4.5
Ultimately, the idea of sticking around with the civilians, criminals though they may be, was simply not an option. Dangerous as they could be, they weren't parahumans and the damage that Fenja and Menja could cause alone – regardless of whoever they were after – was the kind of thing that could put a death knell to Brockton Bay, especially if their rampage happened to drag other parahumans in who wouldn't be as careful as you might be with your powers.
The idea of the twins accidentally stumbling into Lung during their scuffle and accidentally detonating the nuclear option on the entire city was distant, but not impossible. Though you were fairly sure that if you were stronger than Alexandria, you were probably stronger than Lung, that didn't mean you were eager to find out; anyone who could go one on one with Leviathan, even if he had eventually lost, was the kind of figure you were scared to clash with. Not only for your own sake, but for everyone else's.
So there was no real choice. Nor could you leave anyone behind – though you were confident that you could take both twins in a straight fight, the reality was that in the role of a Ward, or even just the role of a hero, fights were never straight. Simply obliterating a mouthy villain's skull wasn't an option, and fighting to subdue made everything more difficult. Villains had it easy, in that sense, even if they faced their own separate challenges.
Quickly devising a plan, you turned to face Skýla and Regent, who were awaiting your explanation; you'd gone quiet for a moment after Console had been in contact and neither of them was much interested in playing the role of leadership.
'I'm going to put these guys,' you said, gesturing to the bound civilians, 'on the roof next door. High up enough that nobody is going to just stumble on them. While I do that, Regent, call the cops and let them know what's happened here. Skýla, check the area to make sure there's no one suspicious around. Then we move out: we have a fight to get to.'
Skýla turned immediately and began a perimeter of the Memorial Hall, not seeing the point in questioning or confirming; she knew her job and just did it. Meanwhile, as you gathered up the first two wriggling captives, you saw Regent slide a phone out of his pocket that looked frankly more expensive than your Dad's car. Mentally, you corrected your perception of him: not just a pretty boy, a rich boy. Between the money he spent on that and the money he spent on his consoles, you wondered where he was getting it all - it can't have been the Undersiders alone, or Skýla would have had the same savings.
Maybe she did, and just didn't care about it. Something to consider.
Time kept ticking as you hauled the men up to the rooftop in a few trips, taking care not to hurt them anymore than they already were. Fascist scum they may have been, but you didn't want to give them any means by which they could try and claim victimhood from the entire scenario.
The scorch marks from Regent's sceptre already gave them too many opportunities for that for your liking.
The entire process must have only take a minute, perhaps two at a stretch, with your wings buzzing audibly as you flitted around at high speed, and when you returned to the ground for the last time Skýla had returned. In her semi-transformed state, she wasn't enthusiastic about human speech, but she was still able to give a nod and that was good enough for you. You trusted her senses implicitly.
'I'm carrying you two. It won't be comfortable but we don't have time to go slowly. I apologise in advance.'
Moving before Regent had the chance to give away his inevitable one-liner, you simply scooped him up and grabbed hold of Skyla's outstretched hand, her hand dwarfing your own, as you gripped her tight. Regent, by comparison, had your arm entirely around his waist pressed as tightly as you felt was safe before he started creaking; if Skýla fell, she would probably be fine in her current form. If Regent fell, especially at the speeds you were planning on taking, he would be turned into a particularly dramatic Pollock canvas before anyone had the opportunity to do anything about it.
The wind whipped through your cloak, throwing it behind you. The entire geometry of your flight was bizarre, a shape that was perhaps the least aerodynamic thing to ever take to the skies, and you thanked your luck that your wings were both intangible and able to support anything you could lift. With Skýla hanging below you, her own shape roughly seven feet of bone and fluff, and your own nearly-vertical body carrying Regent who himself was carrying a staff, and you felt that any conventional form of physics would see the three of your impact the ground quite quickly.
As you flew, you knew you had very little time until arrival. You weren't hugely far from your destination to begin with and with your speed, there was nowhere in Brockton Bay that was further than a few minutes away at your top speed; the city was large, but as you buzzed along at close to two hundred miles an hour, it would take a city the size of New York to make your travel time an issue for anything; especially since half of Brockton Bay's area was taken up by abandoned warehouses and beachside space.
Scarce time was not, however, zero time, and you used the opportunity to cast a question off for better preparation.
Chances that whoever the twins are fighting is working for Iron Rain?
100%
The security of the answer was twofold. Firstly, it gave you an understanding of the dynamic; Kaiser had control over the twins, and it made sense that whoever they were after was part of the overall factional dispute. Was this Kaiser's attempt at revenge in action?
The second reassurance was a simpler one: because your question hadn't been inconclusive, it meant you knew the person they were fighting. The risk of reinforcements was very much real, and you would have liked to have been aware before showing up if you were going to walk into a clash with an unknown; Miss Militia and Armsmaster had already told you about Gesellschaft, at least in brief, and their supply of Fog and Night to the Empire, two of their more intimidating capes. If more had been sent over, who knew exactly what kind of challenges they could represent?
Not much time passed before the twins were looming over their surroundings and shadowing the horizon.
Neither of them were at their largest, but both still stood perhaps twenty five feet tall, taller than even Skýla was capable of being and certainly larger than anyone in your group was the time. Though you trusted Console when they told you that Miss Militia and Triumph had been dispatched, neither of them were yet on scene; you weren't surprised, as neither of them had any form of high speed travel. The roar of a motorbike was something you'd have to keep an ear out for, but for the time being it was simply yourself and your team.
Coming to a stop perhaps fifty metres away, you placed Regent and Skýla down atop a building.
'I hate that so much,' Regent began, but you cut him off.
'Sorry to hear it, we'll figure something out for the future. For now, here's the plan. Regent, you're going to stay away from the action. I don't want you crushed; can you twitch them from a distance?'
When he spoke there was something slightly glum in his voice, as though his stomach was unsettled from the trip.
'Sure, I'm not sure how well it will work though. My power has trouble with people who have weird bodies. Those two fuckers are huge, and I'm not just talking about their ti-'
'Thank you, do your best. I'm going to engage one on one with,' you paused. Which one was which? 'The one with the sword. You try and disrupt the one with the spear wherever you can. Skýla,' you adjusted your focus. 'I want you to stay close to Regent; try and track the area, see if anyone else is around and make sure they don't get to him. He's the most vulnerable one here, so you're scout and bodyguard. Understood?'
Typical to her fashion, she simply nodded and you had absolute faith that she would follow through. You weren't sure what it was, but you got the feeling from Skýla – from Rachel, even – that she had become quite attached to the team dynamic relatively quickly, and though she clearly wasn't Regent's best friend there was a team connection that seemed to bypass their personal antipathies. You wondered if maybe that was how things had been in the Undersiders, or whether the mysterious Grue had been able to concoct some sort of legitimate camaraderie.
With the plan outlined, you took no more time to consider the details. Flying in at maximum speed, you collided bodily with the twin holding the sword, knocking her from her feet and stumbling into a nearby building which shook dust from its frame from the contact; she hit the ground a moment later, as you blasted her with your gravitational wave on the rebound and caught her off balance. Skidding backwards, she tumbled into a prone position.
As you moved, you noticed her sister's arm, spear held aloft, jerk two or three feet to the side, opening up a gap below her arm and revealing to you for the first time who she was fighting; Cricket. It was unusual to see her on her own, and you concluded that she must have been caught unawares, potentially while travelling to meet with her usual accomplices. In terms of strength, she had nothing to even begin to compare to Fenja and Menja.
Despite this gap in strength, she appeared to be doing well enough; a combination of her technical facility, her speed and reflexes, and what you assumed was liberal usage of her supersonic cry had allowed her to last this long. Perhaps, too, she was advantaged by the size discrepancy. Though it was obvious that even a glancing blow could be disastrous for her, the larger size of her opponents made their telegraphing even more blatant and for a practiced combatant who moved as smoothly as Cricket did, dodging that kind of swing was simple.
And it seemed that she was well aware of your interference; the moment the spear was jerked aside by Regent's control, Cricket let loose a blast of her supersonic scream, scattering your thoughts to the farthest reaches of your brain. You felt yourself lose orientation in the air, tilting dangerously towards the ground as the urge to vomit surged through your gut, but you managed to suppress it long enough to throw out a sound dampening field. While the sound was loud and piercing enough that you couldn't make it go away, the impact drifted from all encompassing into the sharp annoyance of a smoke detector, and you were able to right yourself before you made contact with the ground.
The twin with the spear had been less impacted than you had been, and you weren't sure why, but she had still taken a moment to adjust herself and as your field washed over her too, she shrugged off any of the issues she had been facing to refocus on Cricket. Resentment drove high, and you considered revoking the sound dampener simply to spite her, but you thought better of it; you would rather not see your breakfast again trapped inside a helmet, no matter how inconvenient the entire thing might have been for a Nazi.
A blade swung towards you from your side, and only its size prevented you from missing it; the light flashed off it like the sun across the Bay, and the glint of light was enough for you to turn in its direction, waving your arm and deflecting it. You felt your bones rattle and the edge of the blade dug into you but failed to gain any purchase, sliding off your costume and dropping to the side; and as you did so you felt the air shift as her sister came to take a shot towards your turned back.
While it was undeniable that their strength and durability was enhanced considerably in their enlarged forms, you wondered how helpful it actually was against most opponents when the very idea of subtlety became alien to them.
Still, you position was unhelpful, and rather than try to spin around and dodge you simply settled for the next best thing; relying on Regent. While you were confident that he would act, you were also confident – perhaps foolishly so – that you could take the impact if it hit you, and so you used the opportunity to stick the twin in front of you to the ground as hard as you could with your shadows. You had very little doubt that it would hold for long, and in fact you could feel her strength straining against it instantly, but any attempt to slow the frantic pace of the battle was going to work in your favour. The Protectorate was going to be along at any moment, and when it was you could hand over leadership to Miss Militia.
Regent, it seemed, came through, as you heard a loud and eerily deepened curse come from the twin behind you, a bellow that made it through your sound field as her spear was diverted from its course and it crashed into the side of a car, puncturing its roof like a cheap tin can. The airbags went off instantly, before deflating upon contact with the blade, and the alarm began pinging out in sympathy with the still constant wailing of Cricket's scream.
Which was fading into the distance the longer you heard it.
Spinning in the air, you watched Cricket as she began to make her way across the street as fast as she could. Despite her enhanced reflexes, she was no quicker than any other relatively fit person, and you knew that not only would you have no trouble catching her, neither would either of the twins as soon as they were able to set themselves to rights again; it was a futile escape effort. You made certain of it by reaching out and sticking her feet to the ground as she stepped in her own shadow, the jerk of which made her stumble forward and curse as her knee hyper-extended.
Very little of you cared, though you were glad to see her stationary yet again. She had been your first real failure and you were looking forward to correcting it; even if Krieg had also slipped away, he hadn't been caught like she was. She was the one that slipped through your fingers.
You felt a victorious chime in your chest, as though you had finally redeemed yourself, and you wondered how long it was going to take for Miss Militia and Triumph to arrive; the fight couldn't have lasted more than five minutes thus far, if that, but given that they had been dispatched prior to you and you'd still had to travel yourself, they couldn't be that far away.
Curious to hear, you dropped your silencing field and heard a wooshing sound before you felt a thud in the entire right hand side of your body followed by hearing a crack as though someone had hit an anvil with a baseball bat.
You crashed through the building to your left, the bricks and concrete shattering around you, and then through the walls inside, and out the other side, before crashing through the exterior wall of the building directly opposite. Brick dust filled the air, fogging up your visor, and you coughed as the filters kicked in, cleaning the air that you were inhaling. Nothing hurt, for which you were grateful, but it took a moment before you were able to place yourself and stagger back to your feet.
A cheap shot; as you were dealing with Cricket, one of the twins must have been able to get free and with your audio dampening up you hadn't heard them until it was too late. You weren't sure what they had hit you with; the impact covered your entire body and you didn't know if they used the flat of a blade, the body of a shield, or whether the one with the spear had simply slapped you out of the sky.
If that had happened to Regent, he'd be dead; the same was true of Kid Win, Vista, or Aegis. Even Gallant, covered in armour, might not have done so well. Miss Militia too.
You felt anger starting to well up inside of you. You'd done what you could so far to avoid putting any member of the Empire in severe trouble; even Hookwolf, who had been locked in combat before you arrived – he'd signed his own death warrant yet made it out alive. Cricket and Krieg the first time you had met them both made it out alive when, had you so wished, you could have reduced them both to memories. Even Coil's men had lived, along with the Undersiders before they had joined the Wards. Even today, when you had seen Cricket and been frustrated, you had seen fit to paralyse her and hold her in place rather than try to break her. You had pulled your punches – they had not.
You were feeling rather like breaking something now.
Clambering out of the hole in what seemed to be some sort of apartment building – you weren't exactly sure, and weren't going to stick around to check – you let the dust and silt of the detritus spill from you. It clung to the weave of your costume, and you saw and smelt the billowing trail it left behind as you launched yourself into the sky.
The buildings you had been put through were surprisingly untouched from above; the torrent of rubble pouring out of them into the street was the only sign that something strange had happened.
You were lucky that you hadn't hit anyone. Thinking about how you might have responded if you did, you thought briefly that the twins were even luckier. Any given civilian could have died if you crashed into them at that speed, especially if you carried them through a wall.
From the air, you saw Skýla and Regent in motion – at the far end of the street, now perhaps thirty feet in height, the twins were in hot pursuit of Cricket, who was dashing between cars, trying to use the terrain to compensate for her failing mobility. Even from the height, you could see where her hyperextended knee was struggling to keep her weight in motion, and she stumbled more than once in only a few strides.
She was done for, and you were sure of it.
You made after them, slower this time. Your first engagement had been fast and furious and the result had been property damage and an escape – you were focused now more on assisting Regent and corralling the majority of the damage. Whether it was due to the issues with using his power on something so enlarged or simply a matter of stamina, Regent's manipulations were becoming slower and less effective; in one case, you saw the spear wielding twin stutter in motion but ultimately continue undeterred, at the precise moment that Regent stumbled and fell against Skyla's side. She was, more than simply shielding him, holding him up, and your concern grew. It was only through his timely action that Cricket hadn't died at least twice now from her awkward motions, failing to duck or dive from the swiping hand or the jabbing blades that menaced her, and you couldn't help but feel a pang of sympathy. She was doomed, and she had to know it; the cage around her head more of a promise than an identity.
Determined not to allow a fatality, however much you might dislike the girl, you moved to engage again. This time, rather than diving in and attempting to take one of them out instantly, you weaved between the flailing blades, straining your agility to its peak, ducking and diving until you were able to approach the feet of the giants from close to the ground, before you willed yourself to change, your lower body from the sternum down dissolving into an extruded form, hardening with reptilian scales and a whip-like sinuous motion that wrapped around the ankle of the sister with the sword and tugged her from her feet.
The rumble of her body hitting the ground was cacophonous, and you had to stop yourself from instinctively casting out a dampening field. Instead, you surged forward and grabbed the gargantuan blade of her sword, digging your fingers in firmly enough to embed them in the steel as though it were butter, and wrenched it from her weakened grasp, tossing it lightly down the street where it skittered and clattered with all the volume and grace of a steam engine, scraping to a stop not far from where Skýla and Regent watched on.
Even that was not enough to stop her, though, and the giant moved to press her palm to the ground to push herself up and you felt a growl every bit as animalistic as Skyla's in your throat. Why couldn't they just co-operate?
A surge of your gravity pulse, far from its maximum strength but enough to overcome any movement from Fenja or Menja or whichever it was, slammed into her head and she was thrown to the ground again, her skull bouncing off the road hard enough to chip the material. She wasn't bleeding – you were sure that you would have been able to tell, even through the golden spray of her hair, but she had stopped moving and shrank back in size a little, as though unconscious.
You rushed over to her neck. While you held no love for her, you didn't want her to die, and you quickly located a pulse through the cords of her vessels. She may have shrunk back slightly but she was still well over twice your height, and her arteries and veins must have been the size of a hosepipe, and luckily that made locating her beating heart easy enough. Breath, too, spilled from her parted lips, and you knew that she wasn't dead, at the very least.
As you turned, the other sister stepped in your direction, though she didn't appear to be after you so much as she was in pursuit of her sister. You could understand that much at least, and you didn't get in the way too obnoxiously; she wouldn't be allowed to leave, but you would permit her to assess the same things you had done.
Obviously and predictably, Cricket chose that moment as the time to attempt another rapid escape; pushing off from the ground as hard as she could, she began to move as quickly as could be managed, a sort of panicked hobble that would have been pathetic in an endearing way if you saw it being done by a dog but from her was only frustrating. Her preternatural reflexes didn't appear to extend far enough to replace actual tendons and cartilage, and you had no doubt in your mind that her vicious extension earlier had torn something quite crucial in her knee, at the very least; something in her ankle might have popped as well.
With Othala on Kaiser's side, even if she got away there wasn't going to be a rapid recovery for her. In a grim twist of irony, her best course of action might actually be to allow herself to get taken in. She'd be safe from whatever nonsense Iron Rain might deliver to someone who got caught in such a scenario, and while you didn't for a moment presume that Panacea would see fit to help her, she would at least be able to get normal medical care without having to try and lie her way around a hospital.
Her flight was intercepted, however; at that moment, the roaring of an engine finally rumbled into the immediate vicinity and at the end of the road – far in the distance but not far enough to be mistaken for anything else – Miss Militia's motorcycle, with the utterly absurd image of Triumph and his gladiatorial outfit riding behind her, a juxtaposition so ridiculous that in a less chaotic moment it might have drawn a laugh.
Cricket paused as she saw it, and you watched her shoulders fall as though she herself realised that there wasn't going to be a way out of things. Trapped on both sides, with every assembled group against her, you wondered for a moment if she would actually surrender and simply allow herself to be taken in.
Choice was stolen from her, though. Before she could commit to a path, the remaining twin rose again to her full height and moved towards Cricket – deciding to allow the Protectorate to deal with your errant villain, you obstructed her movement and prepared for yet another assault. This time, you waited for a jab of the spear and rather than attempting to parry, deflect, or dodge it, you went with the most dramatic option; grabbing it, you felt it trying to chew its way into the palm of your hand and you weren't sure if it had cut through your gloves or not. Rhizome's work was excellent but the gloves were necessarily the thinnest part of the costume, and you would have to check how well they held up after the fight was over.
Drifting forward a few feet in the air, you brought your other hand up to grasp further down on the leaf-blade of her spear, before you heaved.
Using your fore-hand as the pivot point, you leveraged the Empire giant from the ground, lifting her bodily into the air with her own weapon as the means, and brought her over your head in a sweeping arc. Just as she was about to land, you reached out and assumed control over the shadows, infusing them with adhesive strength, and slammed her into it; she stuck fast, breath driven from her body by the impact. She would be fine, of that much you were sure, but she was almost buried in the shadows insofar as such a thing was possible, and you tugged the spear from her hands before tossing it to the side.
Turning back to Cricket, you expected to see her being subdued by her opponents. While you had yet to work with Triumph, you knew that his own power worked with sound in some capacity – roaring, being the most obvious application, but you weren't sure whether it did much else – and if there was anyone prepared to deal with Cricket's most treacherous trap, it may well have been the lion-headed teen. He was the youngest member of the Protectorate, and so you assumed he must have been only three or four years older than you, but he had been in the system since you were a kid and he must have known how to work in the field. He'd had a dozen times your own experience, after all.
That was not, however, what you saw. Instead, you saw Miss Militia moving towards you rapidly, Triumph in quick pursuit, evidently muttering into her communications device at a fevered pace. Though her cloth veil covered her lips, the motions of her head were animated and frantic.
An abandoned kama lay on the road behind them, and Triumph was carrying a small metallic disc that he was inspecting periodically, between taking stock of his situation.
The two were in front of you in less than a moment, and you overheard the end of Militia's communication; apparently, PRT officers were already stationed nearby and were only awaiting confirmation of safety before coming in, and within moments a large black vehicle pulled up and men emerged, armed with containment foam. You didn't bother questioning how they were going to get them small enough to fit in the van itself for transport. Some things were best left to the trained professionals.
'Miss Militia, what happened? I missed it.'
As you asked, Skýla and Regent came closer, and you could hear Regent's laboured breathing. He was going to need a rest after the day was done, there was no question about that.
'You would know better than us, Penumbra; other than the last moments, we missed everything.'
'Yes, but, it's the last moments I'm most concerned about. Where is Cricket?'
Triumph interrupted at that point, holding out the small disc. You took it from him and looked it over; it appeared to be burnished metal, smooth though with a few scratches and dents around the perimeter where it might have been jostled around in a pack or come into contact with the edge of a weapon. It was reassuringly weighty, though only to the extent that it screamed quality rather than inconvenience.
As you turned it over, you were shocked to see branding; a jack-in-the-box emerging from a small square, angulation giving the illusion of depth to the engraved image.
'Penumbra,' Triumph spoke, his voice gravel – a side effect of his power, you assumed – but still youthful beneath it. 'Have you ever heard of Toybox?'
Actions Remaining:
- Do a PHO Q&A
- Do First Aid training with the PRT on April 8th
- Try your thinker power on Endbringers (after the Empire is done with)
- Consult the others on strategies for engaging the Empire
- Get in touch with Dragon to talk about the Birdcage
So, we arrived, we did our plan, and what happened? Well, we caught Fenja and Menja but Cricket made a getaway yet again! What a scoundrel she is. But she's left something rather important behind. What do we do about it? Questions we can ask, places we can go, people we can talk to, what do we do? Kaiser's plan to try and get some revenge is under way but this was only a single element of it!
Congratulations by the way because if our plan involved stuff that would have made us late to arrive, the twins would have captured Cricket and then what?! I know what, but you don't and it could have been bad!
Going to forgo giving suggested actions this time around, just because it's quite open ended and I can't think of how to do so without seeming like I'm railroading, which I don't want to do. So, you tell me: what do we do?