"Taylor Hebert," Jack Slash said. "So many ripples from such a young girl."
In the background Canary was still singling, but it was low and almost inaudible. I could sense the design of the collar on her neck, and the bomb inside it was obvious to me. That wasn't all that was there, though.
"The collar amplifies her power," my grandfather's avatar whispered. He sounded intrigued. "It makes her stronger while hobbling her at the same time. It's not a design I have seen very often; in mutants it can lead to instability"
"I wouldn't have expected such a diamond in a place like this," he said. He gestured at the camp around us. "Living among the normals as though you were one of them."
I still couldn't speak. Canary's voice kept me from wanting to do anything. I felt drugged, like I had once when I'd gotten a tooth pulled when I was eight.
The normal noises of the crowd around us were gone. The only sounds were the tinny sounds of music in the distance from portable radios, and the sounds of insects flying through the air. Otherwise there was only silence. It was eerie, and it sounded like we were in a graveyard.
How many people had the Nine already killed while I was chatting with Lung and eating Pizza? I should have been more prepared, asked Dinah to check the future for me.
Instead I'd been content to focus on city building while the barbarians were at the gate.
The Nine had been ruining lives for longer than I'd been alive. Even now I was trying to improve the lives of a hundred thousand people and knowing the kind of atrocities they tended to commit, they were planning on killing them all.
They'd torture them first. By the time the Protectorate was even aware of what had happened, all the people I'd promised to help would be left either dead or maimed, physically or emotionally. The Nine would get away, the way they always did, and the world would barely mourn.
I felt anger growing inside me slowly.
They didn't have the right to ruin people's lives. None of these people had done anything to deserve this. They'd had everything stripped from them by a monster beyond their comprehension only to work together to try to rebuild. I'd seen people help each other, neighbors who would never have even spoken to each other in the normal world supporting each other.
These monsters wanted to take all of that away.
My anger didn't show on my face, and it didn't seem to make much of a difference in my ability to take action either. I couldn't exert my power or even move a finger. I simply sat and stared up at Jack Slash as he approached.
Jack Slash sauntered up to me, ignoring Lung. He squatted down in front of me and he reached up and touched my face. I should have felt that it was creepy, but there didn't seem to be anything sexual about it. Instead it was almost as though he was examining a puppy he was planning on buying.
"So much power to make change," he said, staring into my eyes. "And all it would take would be a little push to spin you off in a completely new direction."
He stood up and chuckled.
His laughter caused my anger to spike. He thought this was all funny? All it would take was a single mistake and this would all go very differently.
"I heard about what you did to the Empire," he said. "Apparently you already have a little bit of the cruelty and creativity that's needed to be truly great in this business. Your power is certainly not in question. The only thing that's needed is a little difference of perspective."
Him calling me cruel? That was like Hitler calling someone a racist.
"We're going to create a new world, you and I," he said. "But before that can happen you have to be made better. The best metal has to be forged before it can be useful."
Glancing behind him, he gestured toward the little girl.
"I suppose it's ready?"
The little girl smiled. Her face looked innocent, blonde ringlets framing a face that looked like she'd never done anything wrong in her life. The blood on her apron said differently. "It's ready. It's some of my best work, really. When I'm done she won't be able to do anything to any of us without getting eaten from the inside out. Best of all, there's no metal in any of it, so there will be nothing she can hang on to with her power."
The needle she pulled from her pocket didn't have any metal in it at all. I suppose that was meant to be some kind of defense against me.
It wouldn't matter under normal circumstances, but as things were going now, it didn't look good.
The things the Slaughterhouse did were there on the Net for those who were willing to look. Most people didn't want to know. They were the only parahumans who were feared almost as much as the Endbringers.
The insects were growing thick, now. Usually they only grew this thick around the trashcans when people put something sweet inside. It was strange that there were this many alive; just a week ago it had been too cold for them to be around much.
I suspected that Dad had been fostering their growth. He'd been using them, and I think he'd been using some of the heated buildings vacated by people headed for other cities as incubators. There was enough leftover detritus from a hundred thousand people to feed them all forever.
Was my mind wandering because I didn't want to face what was going to happen? The Nine tortured people, which was bad. Worse was when they turned people into one of them. Turning me into one of the Nine would be the worst thing ever. I had the power to do Endbringer levels of damage to cities, and I wouldn't be working on a three month cycle.
I could build a base on the other side of the moon and the Nine would be out of reach of everyone except when they wanted to rain destruction down on the world.
This couldn't happen. I gathered my will, as much as I could and struggled to use my power. It wouldn't take much power to make one of the tokens in front of me into a bullet that would go through Canary's forehead.
My grandfather had told me countless stories about how he'd struggled to defeat attacks by telepaths, real telepaths, not the bargain basement versions we got here. He'd told me he'd won as often as not through sheer force of will.
It wasn't working for me.
Jack stared at me and frowned.
"This is too easy, It's almost boring," Glancing behind him, he asked "Can we at least let her speak?"
The little girl looked down at her controller and she made some adjustments. Suddenly I found that my ability to speak was back, even if I still couldn't muster the will to actually do anything.
"You know what's about to happen," he said.
"You're going to try to kill the people that I care about," I said. "Murder my friends in front of me, make me like you. There's a funny thing about that, though."
"What's that?" he asked.
"I don't have any friends," I said. "But my family isn't the kind to go down easily."
Canary choked suddenly, staggering back as insects swarmed and filled her mouth. I'd seen the swarm growing behind them, but Jack hadn't read my expression enough to realize what was happening. Birds were pecking at her eyes as well.
They were trying to attack Bonesaw at the same time, but most of them were dropping dead as soon as they got near her. It was some kind of biological poison.
The collar around her Canary's neck exploded, but I already had a force field around her so that the explosion was directed away from her. Metal shards and bird parts pelted the little girl, who screamed.
I levitated to my feet.
"People like to underestimate me," I said, staring at the man who'd threatened to use me to destroy everyone. "Threaten me with laws, or threats of killing me. I can handle that. But when people threaten to hurt my family... well, some people are suicidal I guess."
Jack's right leg exploded as I pulled the bone from it while holding the rest of his skeleton in place. He would have fallen, but I lifted him into the air by his skeleton. It was probably painful, at least from the wince on his face. I telekinetically smashed him in the face with his own legbone, and his nose exploded with blood.
"Jack!" the little girl screamed, but I'd frozen her as well, and I was already disassembling the spiders surrounding her, discarding the rudimentary brains and turning the rest into blades that were slowly surrounding me in a cloud.
"Putting metal mesh around your bones probably sounded like a good idea when you had her do it," I said. I stared down at the ruin of his leg. "Not so much now."
He stared up at me, a look of wonder on his face.
"You're more than I expected," he said.
"There's an implant in his brain that regulates pain," my grandfather's avatar said. "It's relatively easy to reverse it and make pain worse instead of better."
People were watching in the distance. They should have fled the moment they realized what was happening, but instead they were simply standing there, frozen.
They'd started seeing me as a hero. If I did what I was inclined to do, would that be reversed in a moment of anger?
After all, legally I'd be in the clear if I killed both of these people right this moment, but that wouldn't make people accept me any more.
"We have Panacea and the little Seer girl," Jack said. "If that makes a difference. Also, we'll release a plague if we're killed that will make what the Endbringers did look like child's play."
Rage filled me. If they'd hurt Dinah...
My grandfather whispered in my ear. His voice sounded curiously distant.
"You always wanted to be immortal, didn't you?" I asked. "Wanted to be remembered, for evil if you couldn't do anything good."
"Trying to steal my trick?" he asked. "You can't play the player."
His leg had already stopped bleeding, probably from some of the implants that had been placed in him. A little twist and the bleeding started again.
"Sure I can," I said.
"So you are willing to let your minions suffer under the delightful attentions of my colleagues?" Jack asked.
"How long do you think people with metal bones can hide from someone like me?" I asked. "I'm going to kill you all, and I'm going to use the money to actually help people. I might even give it to charity."
He grimaced as I suddenly turned off the pain regulator, but he didn't cry out, not even as I reversed it to intensify the pain to something beyond natural levels.
"When I'm done, everyone will look up to you," I said. "Every night when they look up at the moon."
I twisted reality in the way my grandfather showed me, and suddenly a great wind rose. The world shifted behind Jack, tearing in a way that felt wrong. A portal opened, and I could see gray rocks and a dark sky behind him, the Earth high in the sky behind him.
"To the moon, Jack," I said.
Before I could push him through something hit me from the side like a freight train. Startled, I flew through a building and the portal collapsed. I saw Jack fall to the ground.
Right.
I'd made fun of my grandfather for monologuing; I should have simply sent a token into Jack's brain and then spun it like a blender.
The stripes of the woman who had run into me were startling. She was crawling through the hole in the wall of the building I'd just flown through.
"She has no metal in her body," my grandfather's avatar pointed out. He still sounded strange, tired a little.
"Yeah," I said.
It was weird. Humans had iron in their bodies, even if it wasn't a lot. Any with red blood did as well. Even blue blooded animals had copper in their blood, but there wasn't a single trace of metal in the Siberian.
She was very very fast, and very very naked.
In the space of a moment she was on top of me, a scrabbling whirlwind of claws and teeth, death just inches away from me.
The metal from the disassembled spiders flashed through the air and into her side, but she didn't even seem to notice. I tried cutting into her with it, but there was something very wrong.
Pushing her away wasn't working either. It wasn't a matter of strength. She didn't have any leverage and she shouldn't have been able to hold me down.
The entire building contracted around us, focusing on containing her, but she simply tore through it like tissue paper. I'd fought Leviathan and had less problems. She was an immovable object and that should not have been possible.
I could feel her tearing away at my shields, and as much as I struggled against her I couldn't move her away.
Insects suddenly swarmed us, turning the sky black. I couldn't see anything, and neither could anyone else.
The Siberian wasn't harmed, but she was distracted for a moment, and that was all it took for me to propel myself along the ground and out from under her.
The next moment I was up in the air, and the Siberian was jumping from point to point, as though the air had suddenly become solid. How many powers did she actually have?
She was faster than me, even in the air. I began grabbing up everything I could to throw at her; parts of metal buildings, even cars.
The moment I threw one van at her she stopped coming after me. She frantically turned toward the van, leaping through the windshield and grabbing the driver.
"She doesn't strike me as the kind to be altruistic," my grandfather said. "It's likely that she's a projection. Perhaps the man she is racing away with is the Tinker who made her."
She was fast enough to dodge the missiles I sent after her. She was not, however, fast enough to stop me from turning the filling in his right back molar into a missile that turned his brain into a blender.
She turned and stared at me with hatred in her eyes a moment before vanishing.
Her owner's body fell, dropping to the ground with a sickening thud. Strangely, his body didn't have the characteristic alterations that the rest of the Nine had.
It didn't matter. I had no doubt that they were going after my Dad and possibly other hostages.
Jack had said that they had ways of releasing plagues on the world if they were killed. The man who'd controlled the Siberian hadn't, but he hadn't been modified either.
"Taylor," my grandfather's voice said, suddenly urgent. "Something is happening."
My head snapped around. There was nothing coming for me that I could see. I would have expected Crawler at the very least.
It occurred to me that he might have meant at the camp.
Sensing them was easy; as I'd told Jack, very few people had metal in their bones. I knew Crawler wasn't one of them. Any modifications they made on him wouldn't last long. I'd have to watch out for him attacking me , although from what I'd heard he wouldn't bother with surprise.
I went straight after them, resolved that this time I wouldn't bother with torturing them or even talking to them.
The Nine had proven that they didn't deserve to live, not just once but time and time again. Some of them might have once been victims but they were now monsters, every single one of them.
I saw them standing in a group.
Mannequin was the first to die. I simply willed all of his protective metal to crush inward, crushing his brain and organs before he had a time to as much as move.
Flame sliced toward me, and glass burst harmlessly against my force field. Burnscar and Shatterbird were decapitated as I pulled their heads from their bodies using their own skeletal enhancements.
I didn't see Bonesaw anywhere, but Crawler was leaping toward me.
He'd be harder to kill, but it didn't matter. Metal surrounded him, coating him more and more as he struggled. It was growing into a massive ball, and unlike the Siberian he wasn't able to simply tear out of the growing mass. Physics still had at least a little effect on him.
Jack Slash was the last of those I saw, and I froze as I saw what he was holding.
"It took me a while to figure it out," he said. "This is pretty important to you. I thought I might at least give you something to remember me by."
He was holding my grandfather's helmet in his hand, crushed, probably by Crawler.
I saw red, and his entire body exploded into viscera.
A gesture and everything nearby was pulled out into space. I followed; hopefully whatever plagues they'd released would be vented with the atmosphere. I'd still have to have the PRT quarantine the area and do whatever it took to keep the world safe.
Feeling numb I stood in the space above the earth as I sent the metal covered Crawler in an arc toward the sun. Alexandria had said that powers didn't work past the moon. If that was true, good.
If not, then Crawler would be trapped on a trip taking years toward the sun. It was possible that he might be able to survive inside the sun itself, in which case he would burn in its fires forever.
Good.