Chapter 35: Inferno

-REGENCY ACADEMY SAFEROOM-

"Never heard of you," said Mallory. Izzy dug around in his ear with an elongated fingernail and shifted to the side.

"Yeah, well, not like I wanted you to hear about me nor nothin'. I'm a wanted man."

Dead silence. From up on the stage made by the tipped over and carved out vault door of the Regency Academy safe room, Izzy rather resembled a comedian who was bombing. Fine then. No point going on chatting. Sure, the man liked to make an entrance, but there was a point where he had to consider practicality. He knew what he was here for, the kids knew what he was here for. The kids knew what they were there for and he knew what they were there for. Everyone knew what was about to go down, so delaying it any longer was folly.

Izzy flexed the muscles in his hands. The loose skin tightened, revealing thick veins underneath. His arm pulsed with light blue energy that flowed into his nails. They started to change colour like they were being painted, and they grew to the shape of scalpel blades.

Izzy wielded his tools like a surgeon. The students had felt a little of his quirk while he was slicing through the door without any effort. Now they were seeing it with their own eyes, up close. They needed to observe with the utmost care. If their assessment lapsed in any way, then they opened themselves up to a lethal reversal.

Their goal was to figure out his quirk, exactly how it worked and what its' weaknesses were, as soon as possible.

Izzy's goal? He was going to have a little bit of fun first.

When he moved, the kid's closest up to him, Simon and Mallory, both flinched. The discotech man slowly dragged his glowing talon sideways, as if he was delicately underlining with a fountain pen.

"Discotech: Transplant Surgery."

Mallory felt her head leave her body. She had heard about this. Apparently, after being decapitated, a severed head has about seven seconds of consciousness left. Or something like that, anyway. Mallory wondered what she would use her seven seconds for. She could think about anything. Her family. Her favourite musical. Her friends. Simon, who's severed head was also in her field of view.

She was pretty sure more than seven seconds had elapsed by now, but she figured that, hey, time was relative and our perception of it even more so. She'd go into that cold void any second now, right?

Right?

Mallory came to, and her head had a solid footing. She was attached to a body. She had been un-decapitated. Through what means, she had no idea. She only knew that she was alive!

It was a wonderful feeling. She felt refreshed. She felt energized. She felt colourful. She felt feathery. She felt masculine. She felt oddly light. She felt, from the neck down, like she had a hummingbird mutant quirk.

That was disconcerting.

She looked down. She never recalled being so flat-chested or broad-shouldered. The claws were new too. Of all the ridiculous and Freudian near-death hallucinations, am I right? Except it felt as real as anything. It was the body that moved when she thought about moving it. It was the body that felt cold and that told her brain to shiver. It was the body that Mallory could feel the weight of her head pressing into at the neck. The body whose heart was beating abnormally fast all of a sudden, and making the red blood flush her cheeks.

"Mallory…" Came a chivalrous voice to her side. "I think we've been subject to a peculiar ability. Please don't get any ideas about me because of this, and t-try not to panic…"

Mallory looked forty-five degrees to her left. That was Simon's head alright.

But it was on her body. Oh, anything but that.

Mallory screamed. It was the scream of a stereotypical dainty fifties housewife who just saw a rat in the kitchen. Ear-bleedingly high pitched, and accompanied by a spirited hop backwards. Unfortunately for Mallory, her new lightweight, aerodynamic and slenderly muscled body took the force of her leap a little differently than she had intended. Mallory flew back like a dart coming out of a blowgun and bonked her head on the hard metal wall.

"Their heads switched around! They've got new heads! It happened so fast I couldn't even see!" Exclaimed Porter. Dexter headbutted his twin angrily.

"Thank you for stating the obvious, brother. Now, what do we do about it?"

"Simple!" Cried Simon, stepping forth like a majestic sea captain touching down on uncharted lands. "The head of any hero and the body of any hero are one and the same! It doesn't matter who has what head and what body, we can still fight so long as we have heroic spirit!"

Izzy gagged. Simon pulled his body back like a slingshot and got ready to charge.

"Hummingbird…"

He leapt.

That was his first mistake.

His body was unnaturally heavy, and not well suited to flying leaps at great speed. It was, however, perfectly adapted to flop over after catching its ankle on a chair and writhe around on the floor in pain like a suffocating fish.

"Aw, mate…" Izzy laughed, wiping a tear from his eye. "I love this job."

Simon tried to save face by rolling over onto his knees and assuming a three-point pose, then looking up at the villain cool-ly. It half worked and half didn't. His big, prideful grin remained solidly plastered on his face, however.

"Alright, so perhaps that was a little foolish of me, trying to use the abilities of my old body. Yes, maybe this body was a tad bit heavier than I first imagined. Um, no offence, Mallory. But! I'm more than capable of using this, arent I…?"

Simon extended all ten fingers towards Izzy. Mallory came to just in time to see him do it.

"Simon, wait! No!-"

Ten barbs attached to thin, imperceptible strands splayed out before the boy like a net and fell towards Izzy. The villain got a bad feeling about what would happen if one of those nasty looking barbs got anywhere near him. Sliding back, he cut the air with ten of his own fingers. A flash of blue. Harmlessly, the ten barbs fell to the ground, significantly short of their mark.

"Simon you idiot!" Mallory yelled. "Those take all day to grow back! What's wrong with you? You're basically quirkless now!"

"I'll keep it in mind," Izzy said, his voice slick with sadism. His long, thick, forked tongue was hanging out of his mouth. He wiped the saliva from his fuzzy chin. Mallory got sick looking at him and charged.

Using Simon's full speed, she barreled towards the villain, aiming for a low tackle.

She tripped on a chair that Simon knocked over, and Izzy sidestepped her charge before she bonked her head on the metal wall again. The lizard man was grinning like he was enjoying this profusely. Simon was as humiliated as he was full of righteous rage.

"You kids are a riot. I love doin' that move. Ain't failed me yet." said the villain. "It's you two at the back up next."

Just then, Izzy was bombarded with a sudden attack. A large, red ephemeral hand came down like a guillotine blade where he was standing. To get out of the way, he had to dash like a gecko on hot sand.

Luna almost considered shooting off a beam of light, but with the little supply she had at this time of night, she needed to conserve it for if her life was in immediate danger. She only watched and cradled her severed hand while Izzy got out of dodge.

"Discotech: Exploratory Surgery!"

Izzy made his fingers straight like he was gearing up for a spear-hand strike, then, while twisting them, turned their path towards the ground. When the blue streaks of energy emerged from his scalpel-claws, they shot out in a drill pattern and dug into the floor like a drill. A corkscrew cross-section of the ground emerged from a small hole that Izzy had left. All of the constituent parts that once made up the interior of the floor were still there, just sliced up like an orange peel and pushed aside. Izzy dove into the hole like a seal diving into a hole in the glacier, and just as quickly as the hole had opened, it fused back together leaving a perfectly smooth surface.

"Where did he go?" Luna snivelled.

"He's in the walls!" Yelled Dexter.

"Leave it to me," Porter said cockily. He released a barrage of mighty psychic punches all over the room. The rest of the kids had to duck to avoid the flurry of astral fists. The walls began to dent. The saferoom shook like there was an earthquake, and eventually, Porter realised just how strong the metal that they made the walls out of here was. He'd only managed to bend it slightly and give himself a killer migraine.

"That scumbag… he's taking the impenetrable metal walls that were meant to protect us and using them as his shield while he moves through them with impunity…" Simon thought, gritting his teeth. They all heard the scraping and scratching sounds of their foe slinking through the walls.

The thing was, Izzy couldn't just move through the walls. He could attack through them too.

The cutting beam of blue passed as effortlessly through the walls as it did the reinforced door. Dexter and Porter didn't see it coming. From right behind them, a blade of energy cut them down the middle.

Porter fell to one side, and Dexter fell to the other.

Next was Luna, who only realised that something was amiss when she hit her head on the floor and looked up to see her legs still standing. She felt around her bottom half. A clean incision all the way through the waist.

The kids were being cut up like play-doh. Disassembled like action figures. And their attacker was beyond reproach. Once everyone had been cut up and left on the floor, laughter started coming out of the walls.

On the ceiling, central to the room, a blue circle carved out a segment of panelling, and a rather smug-looking Izzy the Lizard rode it down to see the condition of his enemies. When the villain stepped off of the panel, he kicked it with the heel of his foot, and it flew back into its ordained place in the ceiling and effortlessly fused back where it was supposed to go.

"Oh-ho-ho my lord. Look at the state you're all in! What a fucking laugh!" Izzy clapped and hooted like a baboon. Porter was starting to get more than a little pissed off. "Anyways, down to busin-"

WHAM.

Izzy's face suddenly became very concave and fist-shaped. The man howled with agony, so loudly that the metal in the room vibrated with the frequency of his scream. He jumped back and rocked all around, stumbling like a drunkard.

The freshly amputated porter tried to move himself into a comfortable sitting position as best that he could with his one arm and one leg.

"So, you thought cutting us in half was gonna stop a pair of psychics, did you?" Porter asked proudly. Dexter gave his brother a nod, a silent recognition of a job done well. And then, the other brother summoned a hand of his own. He only grabbed a small sliver of clothing, the flared bottoms of Izzy's trousers, and the villain came down like a log of lumber.

"It's a good trick, excellent at causing chaos in the ranks, but against us in particular, experts at communication, keeping a cool head, and with quirks that don't rely on our body whatsoever, your strategy is less than worthless."

Izzy lifted himself off the ground. Thick globs of blood rained down from his mangled nose. He caught as many of them as he could in the palm of one hand, and the rest dirtied the floor.

"You… Little shits!" He said nasally, struggling to his feet. There, Mallory was waiting for him. It hadn't taken her long to recover from her last missed tackle, and she was gearing up again. Sure, she was totally new with Simon's quirk, but third times the charm, right?

What's more, Mallory was at point-blank range. She wasn't missing this time. With enough speed to send out a mini-shockwave that could be felt across the room as a light breeze, Mallory tackled into Izzy's waist. He gurgled and rattled as his body was pushed back, resisting only by the friction of his snakeskin brogues.

A bit of blood came out of his nose, and he started breathing heavily. Mallory had him in a hold and he was slumped against a wall.

He looked skinny. Pretty weak physically. What's more, his quirk seemed to deal with factors other than physical strength. Even if she was flailing around in an unfamiliar body, in a direct tussle, Mallory felt like she could hold him down for long enough that everyone else could pile on and they'd take him out in one big dogpile. That was wishful thinking.

Porter found it a little odd that Izzy was breathing so deeply and regularly. Usually, if he was to punch someone with an astral hand at that strength who had more or less a regular human body, their diaphragm would be wrecked. They'd be gasping and panting desperately, and that's not even accounting for what the broken ribs would do to your respiration ability.

Was it possible, even remotely, that Izzy was tougher physically than they had previously thought?

Yes, yes it was.

Izzy flexed so hard that his leather jacket started to rip. His chest and biceps grew and grew like they were being blown up full of hot air. His clothes didn't stand a chance. In mere moments they were scraps of cloth that loosely hung over his new physique.

The skin on his face, neck and arms was scaly. That was just psoriasis. Separated on his body by clean seams, however, was something else. This was a different kind of scaly. Real. Lizard. Scales. They were scales that resembled polished crystal. They were all arranged in a square grid and uniform in shape, like a crocodile's scales. The fluorescent lights in the room came down on them and bounced off, leaving glinting spots that lit up the room like a dance floor.

A disco ball. The shiny scales on his burly round chest reminded the kids of a disco ball. That was it.

"W...what?" Mallory said, looking up. She didn't understand what had happened. How had the scrawny piece of shit that she had just tackled turned into a hulking brute?

"If… If he can swap heads around with his quirk… then maybe he can do more complex 'surgeries' too. Like maybe… transplanting his torso with some kind of crocodilian mutant?" Dexter theorised.

"This is bad… this is really bad…" Mallory thought. Her arms didn't even wrap all the way around Izzy's waist anymore. She was right within his death cone, and she put herself there of her own volition. Izzy reached down and grabbed her by the neck with one hairy-knuckled hand. He was playing with a lot of power now. The pressure that Mallory felt was like an industrial vice. More pressing was her lack of air. She felt herself come closer and closer to passing out with each passing millisecond.

Porter shunted a psionic fist at Izzy with all of his mental might, but his new buff body was putting out just enough force to shrug it off. A stalemate of strength wasn't going to help him when his peer was being choked to death.

"What do we do?" Porter roared. Simon addressed the group.

"Luna! Do something!"

"Me?" Luna warbled, her head sticking out from between her quivering legs.

"Yes!" Simon pleaded.

Luna didn't thing. She did something.

"Spear of Helios"

The laser lit up the room with an orange glow for a brief moment of time before it hit Izzy square in the chest. He grunted, and for a second Luna thought she had actually done something. She realised otherwise when the villain trivially puffed out his chest. Luna's beam bounced off of him like he was a mirror. His newly revealed shiny scales reflected and scattered her beam to the point that it was worthless.

She hadn't done anything after all.

"Don't be so impatient, doll, I'll get to ya'," Izzy sneered.

Porter summoned another fist and brought it in from the side. Izzy rolled his shoulder and the two forces clanked off of each other, neither one leaving an impact. Every able student was throwing all that they had at Izzy, but he had made sure that it was worthless.

That made Dexter think. Why? He was perfectly safe when he was hiding in the walls. He had to have been cause for him to reveal himself, hadn't there? That was only rational. Through gritted teeth, he spoke.

"You had to have come out here and expose yourself to an attack for a reason, so what is it?" Dexter demanded to know. Izzy shrugged.

"Might as well share. It's the quirk, see."

-XXXXX-

Name: Isaac Izzard

Villain Alias: Izzy the Lizard

Rank: Executive

Quirk: Surgery

Izzy has the ability to cleanly cut through anything, regardless of durability, using the energy scalpels which form from his fingernails. Things cut by Izzy's quirk do not even 'realise' that they have been cut, and continue to function albeit in separate pieces. This allows him, in effect, to bypass any fortification without setting off an alarm, as even if he cuts a hole straight through, any security measures in place won't even notice that anything has changed. Izzy can also cut people apart into any amount of pieces without killing them. The things that Izzy cuts using his ability can be fused back together in any configuration simply by touching the surfaces which have been cut together, most commonly into their original configuration. However, this ability has the secret function of allowing Izzy to graft parts of other people onto himself or others, either to embolden himself or weaken/confuse his opponents. The main weakness of Izzy's quirk is that it is incapable of killing or causing any 'real' physical damage, although it is very useful for nonlethally incapacitating people.

-XXXXX-

"Good quirk it is. Wouldnt trade it fer' the world. Got a couple of kinks though. For one, no matter how much I cut someone up or where, they just won't fuckin' die. It's incapable of killin' on its own, so if I wanna get lethal, I need to resort to some… outside methods."

Izzy was grabbing on to Mallory's head so hard that she thought she might burst like a watermelon at any moment. Then, he raised her up and thrust her down with the lunging speed and strength of a striking cobra,

"Like this!"

The concrete floor blew apart and splintered like glass. The hard steel layer beneath crumpled like an aluminium can. A few drops of blood came out of Mallory's ears, as well as red pinpricks from where Izzy had grasped her with his claws.

Izzy let go of her and she flopped down into the little crater that the man had left. Her eyes had rolled back in her head, but she wasn't dead. She was still breathing, for one, and squirming around weakly. She had just taken a bad head injury. She was concussed, probably on the verge of being out cold. She'd be alright.

"Of course, when all else fails," Izzy began. He'd seen that his adversary was still living, and reached into his trousers. "I can always fall back on ol' reliable."

Silver, with a stubby barrel and a stocky handle. A thick little barrel with six chambers. A hair-trigger that had Izzy's slender finger wrapped around it. They were almost impossible to get ahold of in this country, and once law enforcement started getting too tough to take down with them, then villains more or less stopped carrying them aswell.

Despite all that, Izzy was holding a gun. His eyes said that he wasn't afraid to use it. He was excited.

Mallory groaned as if she had just woken up, still confused from her blow to the head. The revolver clicked as Izzy pulled the hammer back.

"H-huh…?" Mallory yawned. Izzy was looking down at her with mad eyes. His finger flirted with the trigger, stroking it ever so delicately. Simon hit the floor with his feet, dashing towards them as quickly as his new body would carry him.

"Mal! Get up! Now! Out of the way!-"

Bang.

A tall spurt of blood came out of Mallory's forehead. Drops of crimson poured down Izzy's face and chest like beads of sweat. The girl convulsed before silently sinking down. Izzy's gun hand dropped to his side. He breathed heavily, panting at the ceiling like an overhot dog.

"I could use a cigarette after that…" He hissed. His bow legs quivered. Simon collapsed. He stopped running and fell to his knees. Soon, his torso doubled over.

"M...Mallory…" He said, looking at his hands. Her hands, technically. Did… did he just watch someone die?

Mallory's body went completely limp.

TO BE CONTINUED


Hello everyone! This week, we press on with the final executive versus the students, and it already seems dire! I don't have much authors note related news to share this week, but I hope you enjoy the chapter! If you did, let me know in the reviews!

And as always, thanks for reading! I'll see you in the next one!