Chapter 39: Fever
PREVIOUSLY-
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.
AND NOW-
-REGENCY ACADEMY SAFEROOM-
"MALLORY!" Simon roared. He roared so loud that his throat went hoarse. He couldn't scream super-sonically in this body, so his voice only rasped and gutturally spilt out. His eyes became wet. He balled up his fists from fiery hot rage, but his legs were weak. His body was refusing to stand up out of shock.
Izzy couldn't look any more casual. Panting joyfully, he put his finger up against the trigger again.
"And one for luck…" He grinned.
"W-Wait…!" Simon pleaded. As if the man would listen to reason at this point.
BANG.
Another crack of the gun rang around the room sending shockwaves into Simon. This one went into her chest. Simon swore that he felt the phantom pain of his own body dying. He shivered and bit his lip, his eyes glazing over.
Sickening. Positively sickening. Revolting. Horrific and revolting. Unforgivable. Absolutely… UNFORGIVABLE!
Simon stood up. The burning knot of fiery hatred in his chest overtook his brain, and he charged the villain. He wouldn't have thought twice about killing the man. His teeth were fully bared. He was a berserker, throwing caution to the wind and fighting with claws and rage.
Of course, he was just one boy. And he was without his quirk.
"And one for you too~"
BANG.
Simon flopped backwards morbidly. He steadily streamed blood from the brand new hole in his face. Luna screamed. It was a catastrophe. Izzy didn't seem to think anything of it. He swaggered forward, stepping on Mallory and Simon's bodies as he did so. He was going for the twins now.
"I got three shots left… and by the looksies of things, I got three targets! It must be my lucky day~" Izzy guffawed grossly. His shiny scales bounced points of light all around the room. His gun glinted, shining into the twin's eyes.
"Bastard!" Porter roared. An astral fist materialised flying towards Izzy. The villain met the child's psychic blow with a mighty chest bump. The two forced clashed evenly, with Izzy staggering backwards a half step and Porter's brain rattling with mental recoil.
Izzy continued his advance. He put his hands behind his head and puffed out his pecs, absorbing Porter's flurry of astral blows with his hardened scales and muscular trunk. Every hit knocked a little bit of wind out of the villain and sent him back just enough to keep them in a stalemate. After getting his chest pounded so relentlessly, Izzy started to feel it just a bit.
He grunted and powered through the barrage of crimson fists. Soon, they werent exchanging blows but grappling. Porter had an astral hand on each of Izzy's shoulders, pushing him back just as his legs and hands went against the ground and clawed him forwards.
"Is that… All you got… Kid?" Izzy said through grit teeth. The floor cracked underneath the force of his push. Dexter tried everything he could to help. His astral hands gouged at the villain's face, tugged on his clothes. He even tried to wrench the gun out of their hand. All to no avail.
"God… DAMN IT…" Porter was going through eye-bleeding mental strain. With a splitting migraine, his strength began to fade. Izzy gave one last bombastic thrust to pop Porter's psychic hands. He chuckled to himself.
"That's all, huh?" He laughed. He raised the gun. Porter couldn't think. He'd pushed his quirk too far, and now it felt like a bullet had lodged itself in his brain. How apt.
BANG.
BANG.
The twins were both shot in quick succession. That only left Luna. As the huge hulking silhouette of the villain blotted out the light of the safe room fluorescent lamps, the girl cringed in terror.
He approached slowly. With the number of threats in the room whittled down to just this one small girl, he would have no trouble. He could take his time.
"Ello' there, little girl…" Izzy cackled. He flicked his revolver to the side, and the barrel flipped open. Only one chamber was filled. "Got a bullet left. How about we make this fun?"
The villain spun the barrel with an expert hand motion. It whizzed around dizzyingly, and before you could tell where the bullet was, Izzy closed it back up.
"I call this game 'Russian roulette for one'..."
Click.
Izzy put the barrel right up against Luna's stomach and pulled the trigger. Nothing came out except an empty mechanical noise. She had, at best, four more of those. There was no point to this game. Izzy wasn't about to point the gun at himself. It was just a measure of pointless cruelty. He just wanted to watch Luna squirm for a little while. Give her some time to panic and look at all her dead classmates. Grapple with the fact that she was next, but not give her the time to come to terms with it.
Click.
After the second click, Luna began to think about things. The first thing that her mind came to was her family. Her parents. Her sister. She had one of those moments that she'd only heard about from movies and tv. A 'life flashing before your eyes' moment. She felt the weakest and most useless that she ever had just then.
Trying to become a hero was a mistake from the start. What was happening now made it perhaps the second-worst mistake of her life. The first… she couldn't help but think about it. What she'd done to her sister.
She couldn't help but think back.
-XXXXX-
Luna was born as the oldest of two twins. Only by a few minutes, that was. There was Luna, raven-haired and reclusive since birth. And then there was Estelle, a bright and summery golden-haired girl. They could not have been more opposite, but astoundingly they got along as well as any two sisters could.
When the girls were just infants, it wasn't uncommon for Mr or Mrs Lamont to be awoken at night by the sound of Luna crying, only for them to arrive in the girl's bedroom to find her nursed back to restful sleep by none other than her also infant sister Estelle. Slightly confounded, and with their job done for them, the parent would gladly return to bed.
This pattern was consistent all throughout the girl's youth. When Luna was upset, Estelle was there to comfort here. When Luna drew the attention of bullies, Estelle was the one who fought them off.
It was a strange dichotomy, especially since Luna was technically older. When the two girl's quirks manifested, the dichotomy only became more strange.
The Lamont family was having a day out at the park. The parents had bought both of their daughters something from the ice cream van and let them go play while they relaxed on a bench.
The girls were barely school age. It was about time that their quirks grew in. Edmund and Soliel expected it to happen any day now but were still surprised to see it.
Some trouble was brewing. While Estelle was busy digging a ball out of a bush, Luna had been targeted by two kids. Barely older than her. One parent watched as a kid angrily wrenched Luna's hand open and grabbed her ice cream from her. She immediately broke down in tears. That was to be expected. You don't part an infant from their treats and expect it to go down well.
What happened next could by no means be said to be typical.
It had to have been some kind of universal accident. Soliel and Edmund Lamont could only look on in shock as their dour, dark and emo little daughter began to glow like a lightbulb. It was a complete juxtaposition. Her quirk manifested as the emission of pure light. And she glowed hot. The ice cream in the other kid's hand started to melt and drip down their wrist, and they turned red like they got a bad sunburn.
"Luna, you can stop it, honey! We'll buy you a new one!" Shouted Soliel, trying to calm her daughter down. Luna turned her head, and her expression wasn't angry anymore. She seemed scared. Afraid of herself. Whatever was happening, she couldn't turn it off. And as the sun crowned overhead, the girl's glow only got more intense.
That was when Estelle came in. Feeling Luna's distress empathically, she ran and tackled her sister, cradling her luminant body as she fell to the ground and absorbing most of the shock of the fall herself. Then something even stranger happened.
A bubble of perfect darkness formed. Like a black hole or something. A sphere of nothing appeared in the middle of the park on a summers day.
It appeared that both girl's quirks had manifested on the same day. Estelle had been blessed with light absorption. Any type of light would be voraciously devoured in a wide radius around her.
After the incident, the Lamonts had their situation elaborated to them by medical professionals.
-XXXXX-
Both Luna and Estelle were relatively uninjured. The only thing that the doctors did for them in that regard was to give them a plaster and a lollipop. The visit had a more… studious purpose.
Luna had her quirk examined by several experts. Estelle too, but they found her much less worthy of interest. Luna was almost the cause of a dangerous incident, and so understanding her fully was a top priority.
With some interrogation, preliminary experiments and by studying the family quirk records, the doctors came to a conclusion.
It appeared that Luna reacted to the sunlight. Much like her mother, she absorbed light from the sun and stored it in her body. Unlike her mother, the light that she stored eventually had to be let out. Most commonly that was in the form of a ray of solar radiation.
Luna was something that the doctor's charitably called 'quirk incontinent'. With the type of quirk she had, a particularly feisty accumulation type, she would find it incredibly difficult to manipulate consciously.
What that meant, in layman's terms, was that Luna would have outbursts. It depended on how long she stayed out in the sun of course, but something like that was unavoidable if she wanted to live a normal life. Eventually, all the energy that she passively stored would have to come out some way or somehow. Without proper supervision and treatment, that could end up hurting people.
Fortunately, Luna had a gift. Estelle. In a miracle of genetics, Luna's sister's quirk happened to perfectly complement her own. It was an exact opposite and they completely cancelled each other out. If Estelle used her quirk anywhere near Luna, the light would quite literally be 'sucked' out of her.
With the reassuring presence of her sister, Luna more or less stopped having outbursts. If she ever got upset, the only thing that was needed to calm her down was Estelle's mere presence. Sometimes things got rough, but it was always on Estelle's end. Luna's hair didn't so much as glow for years. You'd be forgiven for thinking that she was quirkless, and with an ability like hers, she seemed to prefer it that way. After all, she could really hurt someone!
-XXXXX-
Flash forward to years later. The date of the incident.
Luna and Estelle had gone through a lot of school together. And now they were just starting to look for what to do after finishing secondary school. There was an open day for a local college, and Luna's parents had dragged their two daughters along. Luna wasn't interested in going here, but Estelle could be convinced, so they were split up. While Estelle was off doing her own thing, Luna was bored out of her mind and sitting on the rim of a fountain, listening to the water.
It was far too hot and sunny out to be wearing all black, but Luna quite literally did not own anything in a different colour. Of course, she only realised that she decided to wear three different shades of black today when she left the house and saw herself in the sun.
That was an omen, she thought.
Throughout Luna's education, one thing was constant. Bullies. For some reason, she attracted them like flies. Maybe she just looked like an easy target. Young people tend to want to be awful to each other for no good reason. It is simply a force of nature.
Luna usually had her sister to deal with that sort of people, but at this exact moment, she was alone. It didn't take much from that point. She gave someone in the crowd a slightly weird look, and they were on her like hyenas to a carcass.
Luna didn't recall exactly how the fight started. She had buried that particular memory, but it didn't really matter. What was important was that this girl was a year or so older than her, about twenty per cent bigger and she had a 'strong quirk' and 'did MMA'.
She looked rough and tumble and was dressed masculine. She had brightly coloured hair, but it was probably natural. Oh, and she had Luna by the collar and was holding her head back so that it was almost in the water while laughing nasally.
Luna didn't listen to any of the shit that this girl was talking. She honestly phased it out. The rumble of the crowd was more coherent to her.
What piqued her interest right away was when she heard her sister from down the way, screaming something. Luna knew that this was going to end messily. She just didn't know how messily at that point.
"HEY! LET HER GO!" Estelle yelled, sprinting forward. Just as the older girl turned around, Estelle jumped. She wasn't exactly an expert fighter. She didn't have any interest in fighting as a discipline. But she could do simple equations and knew that speed plus weight equalled power.
The bigger girl was knocked right over like a bowling pin and sailed into the water, letting go of Luna in the process.
Luna almost fell into the water herself. Estelle managed to land cleanly and grab a hold of Luna, pulling her away from the edge before she ruined her outfit.
"Luna!" Estelle greeted enthusiastically. She was surprisingly causal for having just dropkicked a girl much bigger than her into a body of water, but this was something that she had done more times than you would expect. It was almost completely typical for her. Neither Estelle nor Luna thought anything of it. "Rotten day out, right?"
Luna exhaled slightly hard out of her nose. It was a beautiful day, but Estelle knew that she was uncomfortable in the sun. This was something that Estelle said a lot. It wasn't ever really funny, but it never failed to make Luna feel a little bit better.
"I'm bored and it's lunchtime. Do you wanna get lunch?"
"S-sure," Luna agreed, slightly shaken. "Theres a canteen in the building. Do you-"
"Do you think I'm gonna eat canteen food? Ew, no way. C'mon, I saw a chip shop on the way up here. You're paying, it's your turn."
"I'm pretty sure it's your turn, actually," Luna responded.
"Nope! It's yours, I've been keeping track."
"Well, so have I, obviously…"
They would have continued on like this for some time had Estelle not been interrupted.
Now, the thing that you must realise about bullies is that once you stand up to them they more or less will leave you alone. That is the case ninety per cent of the time. Of course, there is still that ten per cent chance that they will come down on you even harder than before. Those are special cases made up of kids with delusions of importance.
This girl was one of those.
"BITCH!" She yelled, holding out her hand. Suddenly, a blast of compression struck Estelle in the gut. She was floored right away. Snickering, the girl grabbed Luna by the hair and pulled her into the fountain with her. Digging a knee into her stomach, the older girl got on top and held the same hand right infront of Luna's face. "Say you're sorry, and I'll only hurt you a little bit, slag."
Luna lost it. She'd been abused by strangers all her life, so getting bullied didn't make her flinch. But going after Estelle was a different case. That made her angry. Or sad. Or she didn't know. Luna wasn't the kind of person who would throw themselves at a much more capable fighter, but she was the kind of person to have emotional breakdowns, and that could be dangerous.
Luna started to glow. The light refracted off of the water of the fountain and bounced around for all to see, immediately drawing a crowd. Then the water started to boil. The other girl yelped and let go, shooting a blast of whatever it was that her quirk did up into the air.
Luna was glowing a golden colour and had a halo of energy coming off of her. Her hair waved around in the water, spreading out from the boiling turbulence. She looked terrifying. Being close to her burned, and so the older girl ran away.
She staggered away and scampered off in between the crowd, muttering curses.
Estelle was more or less fine. Whatever that attack was, it wasn't actually that strong. She had other things on her mind besides her own slight pain and the scuff that she'd got on her fresh new clothes.
Luna was in trouble.
Estelle jumped into the fountain after her sister. She made her dark bubble and pulled her sister in close.
"There, all good!" She said. Luna could feel the light that was building up inside her be gradually dissolved. She sighed in relief, letting her guard down. That was the wrong thing to do. Because although the feeling felt like it was going away, it didn't stop coming.
Something was wrong. Something was seriously wrong. Luna got a feeling like she was trying to keep vomit down and failing. Something was welling up inside of her inexorably. Her sister squinted and grunted with effort.
"Alright, you can quit it now-" Estelle said, strained.
"W-what?" Luna asked, gripping her sister's wrist tightly.
"You're still glowing…" Estelle said. Luna took a strand of her hair and pulled it infront of her face. Powerful light was emanating off of it, even in the sphere of darkness. Estelle was absorbing as much of it as she could handle, siphoning the solar energy right out of her sister, and still, there was some overflowing.
Luna started to panic. Calm, she needed to be calm. If she calmed down, it would stop. Calm down, god damn it. Why wouldn't she calm down?!
Luna scrunched her eyes shut and tensed up all over. Suddenly, the intensity of her glow started to increase. Not decrease, increase. Her output was increasing and she was doing nothing to stop it.
What the fuck. What was wrong with her? Why wouldn't her quirk just… STOP.
"Luna! That hurts!" Estelle yelped. The girl pulled her wrist back and it was red and smoking where Luna had grabbed her. She was starting to heat up. Oh no. Oh god no. Where was all this coming from? Why now? What did she do? What happened? Why?
Why?!
Luna grabbed and clawed at her own head, screaming at herself to keep it together. It was no use. She was going nuclear. Estelle's quirk was useless in the face of this torrent of sunshine.
Heat and brightness began to increase exponentially. Standing near to her at this point must've been like touching a turned on lightbulb to the flesh of your opened eye. Torturous.
Luna thought that she had gotten it under control. She thought that there would be no more outbursts. She thought everything would be fine from now on, but she was wrong. She wasn't controlling it, she was just holding it in. What was happening right now wasn't the result of any of the mundane events of the day, they just started it off. What was happening now was Luna's fault. She blamed herself for it. All of that energy had just been buried deeper and deeper inside of her, becoming a dense ball that Luna had kept chained up. Eventually, the internal pressure was too for her to contain anymore.
She was letting it all out now, whether she wanted to or not.
Estelle's safe bubble of darkness was pierced by several blazing rays. They danced over its surface like the ribbons of the northern lights and slowly tore it to shreds.
The shroud was melted into nothing by the uncontrollable tide of light. Luna could close her eyes but the light was so bright that it burned right through her eyelids. She couldn't avert her gaze from what she was doing.
Her sister was burning right infront of her, and all she could do was watch.
The girl's skin rippled and fried. She seemed… confused. Like the pain hadn't made its way to her brain yet. Luna wrapped her arms around her torso trying to contain herself, but she was helpless.
She burned right up to the neck, and at that point, she seemed to start feeling it. When she screamed, Luna passed out.
-XXXXX-
On that day, a lot of people around town ended up calling the police. They said in fearful voices that they saw a powerful light and a loud scream and they thought that a villain was attacking. Luna got an earful of that from the police constable that came to give her a talking to at the hospital.
Estelle would be fine, according to the doctors. She'd be medically blind for a little while, but that would clear up with treatment. More pressing were the burns. Doctor's said that the scars would never completely go away, although they might fade.
They were all over her body. Most prominently her arms and chest. Her face had been more or less spared, but that was a small mercy. Suddenly, Estelle's dream of being an actress or a model had a serious wrench in the works.
Nobody told her outright that that was the reason, but Estelle suddenly was getting a lot less warm treatment from other people.
Still, Estelle was an optimist. She wasn't going to let something as superficial as that get in the way of her ambitions. She was unbreakable and willful. Still full of life and energy and joy. One accident wasn't going to change that about her. She recovered remarkably quickly and was back to her old self 'before they knew it' according to her parents.
Luna was a different story entirely.
Estelle had said over and over again that it wasn't her fault. It was just an accident. That she didn't blame or resent her for any of it. To Luna, it sounded very different. Every time someone said that it wasn't her fault, she heard someone lying to protect her feelings.
Because she knew that it was her fault.
Whenever Estelle told her that she had nothing to be guilty about and that she didn't have to do anything to make it up to her, Luna only heard that there wasn't anything that she could do to make it up to her.
Every reassurance sunk her deeper into her own misery. They were like daggers in her chest.
What a cruel mishap that God had made, putting this quirk in her body. They should've given it to her sister. She was strong and capable. The exact opposite of Luna. She would be able to control it, while Luna would be more comfortable languishing in a bubble of darkness for the rest of her life.
But no, Luna was stuck with this curse for her entire life. She was going to spend the rest of her life fearing the day that she would go nuclear again and get more people hurt.
Needless to say, being a hero was the last thing on Luna's mind at this point in her life. So how then did she get from there to here?
It was all the fault of a revelation that she had.
-XXXXX-
When the revelation struck her, Luna was by herself. It was a bright, summery day and Luna couldn't be any more miserable. She was balled up on the sofa in her family home under several blankets and a hoodie. Under all that insulation and in the summer heat, she was close to burning up, but she didn't want to risk exposure to any sunlight that managed to pierce through the drawn curtains (the ones in the living room were far too thin for her liking).
She had decided to take a 'sick day' off school, but really she was just too depressed to leave the house. That counted as being sick, in her book. Plus, it was way too bright for her to be walking around in the open. She could hurt someone… She could hurt someone else.
She protruded a gloved hand out of her mound of darkness. Grabbing the remote, she flipped the tv on clumsily. It was hard to press the buttons through so many layers of fabric, but she managed.
The news was on. It was never anything good, but Luna watched anyway because the last thing she wanted to see was something uplifting.
"And the news today," began the dour-looking woman alone on the sofa. "Prime minister Bastardsword has drawn harsh criticism from meta-libertarian groups after the introduction of new legislation severely limiting public quirk use by civilians. We turn you over to our correspondent at number ten..."
With a fancy, distracting wipe the scene was changed. It was right outside of number ten downing street, the traditional home of the prime minister. A mob of journalists were crowded around a holographic projector through which the image and voice of Hendrickson Bastardsword were being channelled. Although his gigantism quirk made him far too large to actually take residence in number ten, Bastardsword was a man of tradition and was set on using any means necessary to make the building his symbolic base of operations, including making public statements by hologram.
"The issue is actually remarkably simple…" The Prime Minister's voice was booming and deep as usual. "Normal civilians cant be trusted with superhuman abilities, especially not in public. It poses a clear threat to our collective safety as a people-"
It wasn't like Bastardsword could possibly have even known about Luna, but while he started citing statistics on instances of public quirk misuse leading to injury or death, she couldn't help but feel like the colossal man was sticking his head through the television and shouting directly at her.
"You are a threat. You pose a danger to everyone around you. You need to be locked up. It's common sense. Its security…"
But then the prime minister kept talking, and something that he said struck Luna.
"-And that's why if you are so attached to the idea of showing your quirk off in public, theres only one thing to do. Hero school. It's a place where those dangerous abilities can be forged and whittled down in the fires of discipline until they become not dangerous weapons but tools for the benefit of our empire. It is a place where you can be taught self-control, moral righteousness, and most importantly British values-"
He continued like that for quite a while. Much much longer than what it took to sink a hook into Luna.
Discipline.
Self-control.
No longer a volatile, ticking time bomb, but something that could help people. Save them instead of hurting them. Luna felt like she had a fire lit under her. She could… atone with this. Maybe she would stop feeling guilty all the time.
She knew what she wanted to do with her life.
"And that's why I'd like to end on an announcement," Bastardsword said. "People of our fine country, to be opened soon, I give you… Regency Academy…"
-XXXXX-
Click.
Luna was snapped back to reality by the third click of Izzy's gun. She was lucky to make it this far, but she'd need to be a lot luckier than this for it to matter in the long run. She frantically searched the room. Her eyes fell upon the collapsed bodies of Mallory, of Simon. She saw Porter, and she saw Dexter. Then, she saw Dexter move.
Click.
Just a flinch. A short rise and fall of the chest. The slightest movement of his eyes. He… looked at her? Was this just his death rattle… or was he not really dead at all?
Click.
Dexter… winked.
BANG.
Luna felt a gut-wrenching kick to her stomach. She instantly started spluttering and held her abdomen in pain. Something had hit her. Hard. After a couple of seconds of writhing, however, she came to realise that whatever it was, it stopped short of killing her.
She wasn't even bleeding.
From underneath Luna's hoodie, something small and bright floated. A glowing hand made from psychic energy. In its palm was one bullet.
"Eh?" Izzy scratched his head. Luna had an opening. A split second to react.
"Sunspot!"
From behind Izzy, Luna's disembodies legs leapt. They cleared his impressive height and wrapped themselves tightly around his neck and head, strangling him. Then, they started to glow. A searing bright light shone through the girl's dark clothes.
Izzy started wrestling with Luna's legs. They'd gotten away from him somehow. Managed to get behind him, and here he was. How annoying. He was obviously stronger by far, but Luna was being slippery, and Izzy's range of motion wasn't the best.
Luna managed to wrap one leg around Izzy's eye. She focused all of her brightness on that exact spot. The man's wrassling managed to free one eye, but the other wasn't spared. Smoke billowed out from where Luna's leg touched Izzy's face. He cried out, making a terrible rasping sound before digging his talons into Luna's thigh and ripping her off of him. He slammed the girl's bottom half into the ground as hard as he could, breaking several bones. It was too late for his eye, however. Burned right through it. He was half-blind.
Porter roared into life. Was he faking? With a final cry, he used the last of his strength and summoned one more astral hand. It cupped Luna gingerly and then tossed her as far as possible. She sailed through the hole in the door that Izzy made to get in and into the engineering ward corridor.
"Get outta here!" He yelled frantically before Izzy fell upon him. With no more bullets left in his gun, the villain was forced to do it the old fashioned way. Dexter and Porter were both smiling at him cockily. They had gotten one over on the villain. Of all Porter's pranks, this was the one he was most proud of.
The villain decapitated them both with his quirk, took their heads in either hand and smashed them against the wall. He kept smashing them until all that could be made out of the twin's faces was a bloody mess.
But while he was doing that, Luna was getting away. He realised and rapidly dropped the two heads back onto the floor where he had gotten them.
Izzy ran on all fours like a monitor lizard. He chased after his prey with desperation but became more relaxed when his eyes met her. Luna's attempt at running away was somewhat thwarted by her lack of legs.
All she could do was pathetically crawl her way along the floor. With the powerful pain in her abdomen, even that was slower than usual. She had barely made it three meters down the hall.
Izzy covered that distance in two swaggering, sauntering strides.
"You thought you could get away from me, didn't ya', girlie? Sorry, but I'd be pretty shit at my job if I let that happen. Now, I am many things, but bad at my job? No way sweetheart…"
The villain picked Luna up by the collar, and she choked as he pulled and flipped her over. He got down real low until he was basically straddling the girl, and he held her head in place by grabbing her hair. He started to lift his other fist into the air. Luna could feel where it was about to go next.
She was so… useless.
Too useless to fight, too useless to even get rescued. It all came back to her quirk. Not just her terminal incompetence in controlling it, but the effect it had on her life. It destroyed any confidence that she might have had. Slowly it eroded any positive quality about her until she was just this. A victim.
And that was all because it was only good for one thing. Hurting people. Indiscriminately.
Luna had a revelation.
She couldn't win, but she could go down swinging.
"If… If this quirk is only good for hurting people… then I might aswell let it hurt someone who deserves it…"
Luna put a brave face on.
She extended her hand. Almost tenderly, and cupped it against Izzy's face. She slowly slid it up to be over his one good eye. The gesture gave him pause. He made a quizzical face. Weakly, Luna whispered something, which the man turned his head at to hear a little better.
"Let's see… How you like it…"
"Sunset Override…"
Luna lit up like a supernova. She became like a column of pure sunshine, right underneath Izzy. The man screeched and hissed like a vampire, thrashing and breaking away from the girl's incredibly light hold. However, he was not near fast enough to get out of range of Luna's outburst. His body was fried in a sea of absolute white. His skin crumpled up and shrivelled, turning red and seething. The juice in his eyeball started to bubble from proximity, and he held his hands over his eyes and shut them as tight as he could. It didn't help. Luna's light could shine right through a human hand and poke through eyelids like they were tissue paper.
Izzy was being sunbaked.
His neck, face and arms received the worst of it. His torso, thick and armoured with reflective scales, bounced the light away and focused it into many tiny points which got hot enough to melt little holes in the wall. Like using a magnifying glass on a sunny day but on steroids. Luna burned through all of the energy that she had. She became a husk. Barely conscious, she looked on at the reeling reptile.
He was in pain, and he was blind. Both eyes had been taken out. She led him away, and she crippled him. It was something, at least. But he wasn't defeated.
"I… Fuckin'... Hate… KIDS!" Screamed Izzy. He pounced upon Luna with his enormous weight, panting like a dog. He opened his mouth wide, revealing rows and rows of blade-like serrated teeth. And then, he started to hunt around for Luna's neck, laughing about how much it was going to hurt.
Maybe this was alright, Luna thought. If she had to die, she was glad that she could die giving other people a chance. She couldn't save anyone. That was just her fate. But she could do something. She had cut the cheek of the devil. A plain fact of her existence was that a quirk like hers wasn't fit to save anyone.
This was the best she could do.
But no matter how much she tried to take comfort in that, it didn't work. She still had the same miasma of guilt on her mind. She helped her classmates, but she still hadn't made it up to Estelle. Her thoroughly expended body attempted to shed a tear but was unable.
Izzy's teeth nicked her jugular. His hot, stinking breath blew over her face, and his heat and weight were pressing down on her stiflingly. He grabbed both of her arms in his taloned grip and held them down. She was going to die, and it might as well have been in vain.
What a shit excuse for a hero she turned out to be.
…
…
…
…
…
Something tapped Izzy's shoulder. He only paused for a split second out of surprise.
"Excuse me…" Said a voice that the villain just about recognized from earlier. He didn't see anything, because he'd been totally blinded, but he felt a neck-crunchingly powerful kick to his chin not half a second later. The villain grunted, trying to steady his shaking head. He reared up and lashed out at his assailant, slicing the wall of the corridor all the way along with his quirk. He hit nothing. When he returned to the prey that he had underneath him, it had disappeared.
"Alright, alright… Which fucker's come to the rescue this time, eh?"
"Nobody came to the rescue… you just forgot that we were here…"
"Huh?" Izzy huffed, coming to his feet. Something hard hit his cheek moving at high velocity. He staggered and whipped his head around crazily. This wasn't going to work. Something kicked the back of his knee, and as fast as that happened something hit his face from the front. He couldn't even tell how many people were attacking him.
Smashing. He liked a challenge. Izzy extended one finger and tipped it with his quirk. Without hesitation, he plunged it into his own neck.
"Discotech: Nerve Lift Surgery…"
He abandoned his eyes. Izzy's attackers watched as any colour left in them faded to a dull grey. The nervous tissue previously allocated to them would be better put to use elsewhere, he figured.
"He's performing surgery on himself right infront of us…"
"When a fella… goes blind…" Izzy said. "His other senses… become more acute… as it were…"
Izzy flicked his forked tongue in the air. He took a deep inhale through his nose, and he listened closely.
"Stereoscopic taste… Heat detection like a lizard… Smell… Hearin'..." Said the villain. "All of these things make a more than adequate replacement for a fella's eyesight…"
Izzy's enemy rushed him, trying to stop the surgery short. The lizard countered with a quick dive to one side and a bulky lariat. Whoever was attacking him, they were knocked straight to their ass with a tight spin.
"So… He took the nerves dedicated to his eyesight and surgically grafted them to his other senses… Now he can 'see' even better than he could before…"
"Okie dokie…" Hissed Izzy. "Let's see what we're dealin' wiv' here…"
The sound of two heartbeats, absolutely. The body heat of two people, that was for sure. Then he arrived at the smell and started to detect anomalies. The smell of blood. They were injured, but that could mean anything. A lot of blood was going around tonight. One body was muskier, while the other was perfumey. A surefire sign that one attacker was a boy and one was a girl. But from where he was standing, he could smell even their hair. One had slightly greasy, boyish locks whereas the other was smooth and smelt of shampoo. Another signifier of gender, but the bodies didn't match up to the hair. They were switched.
Izzy realised immediately who these two were.
"Oh oh oh… Looks like you two survived…" Izzy sneered. "More bullet dodgers… What a pain in my arse…"
"Aw, was my acting that good?" Said Mallory. Dexter hadn't just managed to stop a few bullets. Every single shot he managed to stop short of it ripping through his peer's bodies. When Mallory felt the thud of a bullet against her skull but didn't immediately die, her first instinct was to play dead.
Everyone else had the same idea, except Luna of course.
"You had me fooled," Simon sighed. "I got pretty upset. Not proud of myself about that. But it all worked out in the end, right?"
They werent uninjured. Even if a bullet doesn't go straight through you, you werent going to be standing up for a little while. Simon and Mallory would be lucky to get out of this without a few surgeries, but right now they could put it to the back of their minds. They were hopped up on adrenaline and ready to dispense justice.
One question remained for Izzy.
"Now all I gotta know… How in the hell did you figure out how to use them new bodies so damn quickly?"
"We didn't. Duh." Mallory chided.
Izzy checked their heartbeats again. He triangulated their exact positions and determined… Yes, one of them was riding on the other's back. But what did that tell him? Nothing on its own…
"C'mon big guy, think about this for a second," Simon pleaded. "When you cut my- erm, Mallory's stingers off, you have to realise that they didn't actually stop working, right? They were just… detached. Now, if a person can stay alive in two pieces…"
"You didn't…" Mouthed Izzy.
"It was my idea, actually!" Mallory interjected. "I took my own stingers... and put them in myself!"
"So I control Mallory…" Simon began.
"But I have Simon's body…" Mallory finished.
It clicked. Izzy clapped like a maniac.
"Very clever you little shits! Bird boy is controlling his own body by using someone else's body control on the gal who he switched bodies with. And now you're ready to fight, is that right?"
"Right," both of the kids said at once.
"Wrong!" Izzy corrected, suddenly swinging his claws. A blade of blue energy cut its way over to the duo. Simon dodged, but with this strange new control scheme, he was experiencing a slight input lag. Izzy caught an arm with his attack. "Nuthin' matters if I can just cut you put again! I'll cut you up so good that all the king's men couldn't put you back together…"
Simon took his own arm and put it back where it had been detached from. It affixed itself with no issues. Izzy coughed awkwardly.
"Another weakness of your quirk. If a cut surface comes into contact with another cut surface soon enough after the cut, then they fuse back together. That's how you can re-attach things that you cut, like peoples heads or your own body parts. Of course, I'm fast enough that anything you cut off of me I can put back on in less than half the time it would take you. Put simply, you can't cut me. That surprise attack at the start of the fight got us good, but now I know what your capabilities are. And truthfully, I'm not scared of you anymore."
"Little fucking runt…" Izzy murmured. "I… Fuckin'... Hate hate HATE… KIDS!"
Izzy reached to the sky. The muscles in his lizard chest expanded like balloons, flexing at their maximum strength. He brought his fists down and struck the floor in a petulant destructive rage, sending a shockwave through the building. Simon and Mallory began to wobble, losing their foot.
Then, the floor fell away. A big chasm opened up in the engineering ward hallway. Izzy smiled. This was unexpected. He began to pound the floor repetitively until the entire thing collapsed. He gave the walls a good thrashing aswell, and the ceiling.
It was like the entire ward was coming down. The floor came away, and just when Simon thought the fly, the ceiling came down on him too.
With nightmarish laughter from the reptilian villain, they all fell into the darkness below.
TO BE CONTINUED
Hello everybody! We return to the battle in the safe room, and finally, we receive some much-requested confirmation. Mallory lives! What happened in the last chapter was just a typo, don't know how I made such a silly error but I've since gone back and re-edited it. So if you saw Mallory's name last chapter and got excited, but were disappointed when it got changed, now you can be excited for real!
This chapter is pretty Luna centric, as you may have noticed. I have begun to like Luna a lot more over the course of plotting out this arc. Not that I ever disliked her, but after we received that wonderful commissioned artwork I started to feel a lot closer to her as a character. There are big things in her future for sure! Uhm, not that I play favourites of course... ha...
In terms of news, I've done some re-editing to the order of all the chapters in this arc up until the finale. From now on, there will be less jumping around and more of a straight shot to the end of each fight. There are still plenty left to conclude, watch out for them! With this in mind, you can definitely expect the next chapter to be the end of the battle versus Izzy, or the chapter after that depending on how long this thing ends up being.
Anyway, what did you all think? Personally, I'm pretty proud of this chapter. I noticed that a lot of the battles in the last few chapters we've done focused rather sparsely on OCs and more on my characters. This wasn't intentional of course, but its good to have that rectified with a chapter that's all about other characters! Anyway, let me know your thoughts and opinions in the reviews. And as always, thanks for reading! I'll see you in the next one!
